Modern Workplace & Collaboration

With the mobility of the workforce, whether employees are permanently working from a home office or on the road, or simply checking their emails and using their laptops and tablets when they’ve stepped away from the office, modern workplace and collaboration is a normal occurrence for users, and something that requires an organization to provide the tools and solutions that help users be productive wherever they are, on whatever device they have at the time, in a secure manner.

Rather than helping organizations upgrade their laptops, desktops, email and file systems incrementally doing the same thing that has been done for years, CCO is helping organizations understand and jump into new and modern ways of leveraging available technologies in this cloud, mobile, and security-focused world.

Background: CCO was contacted by an organization that wanted to empower its 20,000 employee field personnel with the latest in Microsoft Windows 10 laptop systems. Normally the process would involve building the latest system image, running each system through the imaging process, and issue new systems to uses a handful of users at a time.

CCO’s Involvement: However, instead of rolling out 20,000 devices over a 12-24 month timeframe, CCO shared with the organization new ways CCO has developed that cut deployment time by 70% and resulted in a more secure device, better end user experience, and one that has lowered ongoing maintenance and management time of the user devices by over 40%.

CCO’s Solution: CCO introduced a number of new deployment and management mechanisms available in Windows 10 and Microsoft’s Office 365 / Enterprise Mobility + Security suite of tools to the customer, that leveraged built-in technologies like “AutoPilot,” “Over the Air Bitlocker Encryption,” and “Office 365 Data Security.” Rather than setting up a global infrastructure with teams of trained experts around the globe sitting with boxes and boxes of systems “imaging” the new systems and then shipping the devices to each user, CCO built the image and application implementation solution in Microsoft’s cloud. The minute the device is turned on and a user (which in many cases was the actual end user of the device itself) logged into the Office 365 / Windows 10 deployment portal, a device was remotely encrypted and software was deployed “over the air” to wherever the device was.

Many times a site administrator would provision the 500 or 1000 systems for users in their site. In smaller sites, a computer would simply be drop shipped straight from the manufacturer right to the end user themselves.

The End Result: What was initially planned to take well over 16 months to complete was done in less than 7 months. Instead of users waiting months for their device, more users got their device quicker, and the security policies the organization sought to deploy as part of this rollout were implemented across the entire enterprise as part of this deployment, not 2 years later, thus improving the overall security posture of the organization.

A new era of computing suggests a new way to deploy systems that didn’t exist just a couple years ago, but is now the standard for enterprise rollouts. The key has been to get CCO’s consultants involved early on, have the newer best practices shared with I.T. personnel, and have CCO’s experts do knowledge sharing to I.T. teams on the use of the latest technologies that decrease time for deployment, saves costs, improves security, and ultimately helps the organization move on to the next series of business initiatives in a more efficient manner.