City of London improves organization-wide collaboration with Microsoft Teams and Agilisys

Published on August 1, 2019

Summary

Agilisys built upon their previously deployed modern workplace solution for the City of London Corporation, delivering Windows 10 and Office 365 for more than 3,000 staff. The City of London was making good use of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business across the organization and wanted to unlock the potential of Microsoft Teams. Agilisys deployed Microsoft Teams to 3,000 users, delivering the application to all desktops within the organization.

Agilisys implemented a provisioning solution to enable self-service request in a way that prevents uncontrolled growth of Teams and turned on group expiration to manage inactive Teams and sites. Agilisys supported the City of London IT teams in delivering communications and training to the organization to maximize the use of Microsoft Teams.

Challenge

The City of London had already moved its users and content to Office 365 more than a year earlier and experienced significant benefits moving to a new SharePoint Online intranet and modern group-based SharePoint sites. However, they did not deploy Teams at that time, as it was a new product without the enterprise-level security controls they wanted.

Strategy

Agilisys implemented the right governance prior to the full launch date, which set the City of London Corporation up for successful teamwork right from the start. Prior to this, Agilisys worked with the City of London to run a pilot, identifying key users and use cases that could help test the application before launching it more widely.

Agilisys developed a provisioning solution using a SharePoint front end, Microsoft Flow, Azure functions, and patterns and practices. This allows employees to request both Teams or modern sites using a self-service workflow, and ensures that the creation process contains checks and balances to prevent duplication and manage uncontrolled sprawl.

Agilisys also configured the group expiration policy to ensure that group owners are regularly confirming that they are still using the group, and to archive and delete inactive Teams and sites when they are no longer needed.

As part of the deployment, Agilisys packaged the Teams app and pushed it out to all desktops via the corporate application catalogue ahead of launch date.

The City of London has now adopted a Teams-first approach to content and collaboration, driving all new requests towards Teams. Feedback from within the organization has been great, and the Teams training sessions have been fully booked right from the start.

Where appropriate, the organization has ‘Teamified’ existing group-based sites to ensure that a team’s content lives in the same place that their collaboration happens.

I’m very pleased with the deployment of [Microsoft] Teams, via the provisioning tool, which has provided both a great user experience and is an excellent example of what can be achieved using the Office 365 toolkit.

Sam Collins (Head of Change and Engagement, City of London Corporation)

Results

Following the successful implementation of Microsoft Teams, employees within the City of London Corporation are empowered to be more productive and efficient.

Building on the success of the original move to Office 365, implementing Microsoft Teams has delivered great productivity benefits to staff across the organization. It is now easier than ever for them to put their fingers on the right information at the right time, allowing them to access data and content needed within their team or project. What’s more, this is done in a secure, organization-defined manner, so the City of London can confidently empower its users while still maintaining strong information governance.

Read full case study