Autopolis deploys its new Microsoft 365 environment in Proximus NXT' hybrid cloud
Autopolis deploys its new Microsoft 365 environment in Proximus NXT' hybrid cloud
After being selected at the end of 2019, Autopolis' new collaboration and communication environment entered into an operational phase just as the Covid-19 pandemic was forcing companies to urgently find new ways of operating. Luis Trindade, IT Manager of Autopolis, tells us how its company has taken advantage of the new tools deployed by Proximus NXt to strengthen its resilience, increase its agility and accelerate its transformation.
An obvious choice
“We had a whole range of needs,” explains Luis Trindade. “Every year in October, we present the following year’s projects and budgets to the Autopolis management. Different projects were in the offing for the year 2020, but they were all linked.”
“The first problem we wanted to deal with was the management of the mailboxes in our messaging system, which had really become time-consuming.” The Autopolis IT team had to allocate additional storage space to its messaging system almost every month to cope with the growing number of users and the continuously increasing size of the mailboxes.
“We also wanted to optimize the management of our Microsoft Office licenses and, above all, equip ourselves with a modern collaboration tool, like our car manufacturer partners who were already using videoconferencing tools,” he adds. “In view of these needs, switching to Microsoft 365 seemed to be the obvious choice, and so we presented it to the management team.”
Overcoming the hurdles
“However, we had to overcome quite a few hurdles along the way”, says the Autopolis IT Manager. In the run-up to the migration, Autopolis had to convert its entire computer fleet to Windows 10. But quickly, the challenges became more complex: “We faced problems with the supply of IT equipment”, he says. “And at the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.”
Given the urgency of the situation, the company quickly activated its hosting in Proximus NXT' U-flex 3.0 cloud environment. As Luis Trindade puts it, “We migrated our mailboxes and upgraded our IT equipment in one go, sometimes remotely, and sometimes on site. At the same time, we had to set up teleworking solutions for our employees.”
Hybrid cloud
“For several years, our infrastructures had been hosted in a private cloud,” recalls the IT Manager. “Switching to a hybrid cloud solution struck us as a natural step towards the smooth transition to the public cloud.” Once again, Microsoft 365 proved to be a wise choice, especially as the IT team needed to migrate its entire MS Exchange messaging system and have a toolkit available to roll out its projects.
An environment up and running from the start of the crisis
“We created a Teams environment as soon as the lockdown came into force, which allowed us to facilitate and improve the internal communication flow,” explains Luis Trindade. Today, the hosting of the new environment in Proximus NXT' hybrid cloud is fully operational and the migration of the mailboxes is complete. “We are still in a learning and training phase,” he says, “but we are using Microsoft 365 tools on a daily basis, including Teams for communication and collaboration and the Stream video service to create multimedia content and train users.”