Bob, ICT Change Manager, introduces Office 365.

What needed transforming and why?

In order to support the council's vision for a smarter, mobile and more collaborative working environment we needed to look at the applications and methods we provided to staff.

Who was involved in the transformation project?

ICT colleagues play a major role in the development and implementation of most transformation projects.

For more information you can contact: 

  • Paul Thompson (Technical Project Manager)
  • Bob Wilde (ICT Change Manager)

What’s happened?

  • We evaluated the options for collaboration available from a number of suppliers. These included Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, Huddle, Alfresco and Watchbox
  • The most cost effective option was the Office 365 suite from Microsoft
  • Office 365 has been adopted as the new office suite for the council

What effect has the changes had on employees?

Office 365 provides a vast range of products for staff to use but also a new range of controlling access to hardware. It has been the basis of the successful Social Care Mobile working project.

Office 365 has enabled ICT to streamline the process of logging on to mobile devices, for example users with the Surface Pro can use facial recognition to log on and they can take signatures electronically whilst visiting people under their care.

All staff will now receive a 99gb email space as standard, that is 1,000 times more than the default allocation we had before.

Documents and emails will be in the cloud making it easier to access them from anywhere.

Staff will be able to share documents with other staff without having to email them.

Before the end of 2018 we will introduce the ability to securely share documents externally without having to email them.

SharePoint (part of Office 365) is being used to develop the Intranet as more informative and interactive site.

What effect have the changes had on our customers?

In social care, this has enabled social care workers to provide assessments in one visit in many cases, plus signature can be captured electronically.

We will be using Teams and Skype (part of Office 365) to enable secure internal and external collaboration of documents and video conference.

Office 365 Bob