CASE STUDIES
Find out what challenges some of our prominent clients faced and how using SimplySo helped solving them.
Aarhus, the second largest municipality in Denmark, employing some 28,000 employees, has decided to roll out Office 365 to its employees.
The challenge
However, Office 365 was recognized as quite a mouthful for the “average” user since it would demand a great amount of training to master, in particular the complexity of SharePoint Online.
SimplySo
To respond to these challenges, the city of Aarhus decided to use SimplySo for Office 365. This decision was primarily made to provide users with an easy and intuitive user experience when working with folders and documents, featuring well-known logic as well as useful social features.
Secondly, the city of Aarhus decided to use SimplySo as their general portal to access Office 365, which embeds features such as the Office 365 Email and Calendar. By doing so, SimplySo by default shields the users from meeting new applications in the Office 365 app launcher. New applications will normally cause support questions and insecurity among many users.
One of the first departments to roll out Office 365 and SimplySo was the Department for Health & Care (Magistraten for Sundhed og Omsorg). These approx. 6,000 users were among the first to use Office 365 and SimplySo. They were thereby equipped with limitless access to their content across devices with a straightforward user interface, that can actually be operated by anyone. This is especially relevant as most of their daily users can be categorized as inexperienced IT users.
SimplySo is a valuable Office 365 add-on, providing our users with a familiar user experience saving us extensive SharePoint training.
- City of Aarhus
It was essential that SimplySo was easy and intuitive to use for our employees.
Julie Frederiksen, PAW SKO
PAW SKO is one of the major retail chains in Denmark when it comes to shoes. They know all there is to know about shoes for the entire family and they have a long and proud tradition of advising their customers. Traditions are important in PAW SKO, being a family owned business established in 1974. They slowly opened more stores, and are now present all over Denmark with 18 stores.
The challenge
With 18 stores and a headquarter office that needs to interact with and coordinate the entire retail chain; making sure everybody gets the same information, communication and file sharing were often issues. Emailing was found to be too slow and inefficient and the company data was stored partly on local PCs, an old server and even in Dropbox. This resulted in content being hard to find since no one could remember where it was stored. PAW SKO faced a need of backing up their files, keeping them secure and being able to share those files internally with the store managers. In the summer of 2016 they turned to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, but quickly came to the conclusion that it was too difficult to use and it did not fulfil their basic needs in terms of usability.
SimplySo
PAW SKO decided to provision SimplySo to their Office 365/SharePoint Online to make file sharing and collaboration more intuitive. Since PAW SKO does not have their own IT department to educate and train the users, it was essential that SimplySo was easy and intuitive to use. With the intuitive user interface, all PAW SKO employees are now able to collaborate and share documents. Julie Frederiksen from PAW SKO was responsible for implementing SimplySo, and she, along with the management, is especially happy about the high level of data security when sharing documents between departments.
By adopting SimplySo, PAW SKO now have a very intuitive user interface for quick and safe file sharing, social collaboration; meanwhile their data is securely stored in SharePoint Online at all times.
- Julie Frederiksen, PAW SKO
The management consultancy agency Hildebrandt & Brandi since its foundation in 2004 helped and advised organizations and managers on strategic- and change management. The consultants at Hildebrandt & Brandi focus on the individual client with a holistic approach to create as much value for the client as possible. Hildebrandt & Brandi has an important focus on culture and knowledge sharing among all employees, to ensure that everyone is performing their best. With more than 45 employees in two different locations that can sometimes be a challenge.
The challenge
Hildebrandt & Brandi was already storing its data in SharePoint and using the classic Office applications and Outlook. However, the IT administrator was fighting an increased use of Dropbox and low SharePoint adoption. The users had simply lost their patience with SharePoint, finding it both too difficult and slow to work with. Being a successful agency the employees are always busy. They found it unnecessary and a waste of time to looking for documents, which they also had trouble accessing when on the go. Both the knowledge sharing and social aspects between the two locations hence suffered. It was difficult keeping up social relations just by emails.
SimplySo
Once Hildebrandt & Brandi decided to use SimplySo, their data was easily migrated to SharePoint Online and they could start working right away. With the intuitive user interface, SimplySo required no training. Users found it easy to locate the right documents fast and when needed. Even when the consultants are on the go, they can get work done, since SimplySo can be accessed from any device. The ease of sharing files and documents contributed to Hildebrandt & Brandi’s ambition of knowledge sharing among their employees. This reduced the number of emails since multiple users could work on the same document. SimplySo also contributed to a greater social engagement at the workplace. Users can now post pictures, files and comments on the wall – keeping everyone updated about the latest news and social activities.
Compared to the ordinary SharePoint solutions, the company saved both time and resources, as their users needed no training. There was no need for expensive SharePoint consultants. What the IT administrator was especially excited about is the high level of security and data governance maintained. Data stays secure at all times in SharePoint Online and there is no risk in provisioning SimplySo onto the SharePoint Online tenant.
SimplySo got us back on track, now as happy SharePoint users.
- Rasmus Nielsen, Hildebrandt & Brandi
The Solution
The solution is based on SimplySo and Microsoft Office 365. SimplySo ensures a logical approach to data across digital devices and employees. Thus, the individual employee, even in the field, can access all relevant data from his or her phone or tablet via one input. This ensures that the users are always updated with the latest statutory safety information on the use of machinery and chemicals, registration papers on vehicles and other relevant information on wiring etc. The solution is also used for general internal communication to all employees. The solution is optimized for use on both desktop and mobile devices as well as several user groups.
SimplySo
SimplySo
With SimplySo we have got a solution that gives even the least strong IT users a logical way to access valuable information. We have faced a great challenge in terms of communicating and distributing information in our organization. The fact that the solution is based on Office 365 has meant that we have achieved an even better return on our investment in Office 365, and have had several proprietary systems run.
The fact that the solution is based on Office 365 has meant that we have achieved an even better return on our investment in Office 365, and as an extra bonus we were able to discontinue several proprietary systems.liy.
-Niels Sloth Christiansen, Department Manager Contractor Unit Aalborg Municipality.
