OneDrive: The road taken
The value of OneDrive through three customer voices: Gap Inc., Textron, and City of London
Hi Peer,
The experiences of others can make decision making more decisive. Like roads previously paved, it’s good to know when and if to take a left turn, a right turn, or a U-turn. No matter, it’s your turn - should you choose to read more beyond these turns of a phrase - to learn more about moving to, and using, OneDrive in Microsoft 365 - from your peers - other customers who’ve reviewed, chosen, deployed, and now use the service.
The road less traveled, is good for exploring. But for knowing what’s worked and why, it’s nice to travel a road more traveled and well mapped, sorry Robert Frost. Walk on (down the page)… this article explores OneDrive deployment and adoption through Microsoft customers: Gap Inc., Textron, and City of London Corporation.
By the end of the read, I hope it will have made all the difference.
Gap Inc. - moving files off device to the cloud for improved collaboration
10,000+ employees
From its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Gap Inc. creates the casual attire worn by people of all ages all over the world. And they needed a more reliable service - moving away from files locked or limited to on-device only. The move to the cloud brought backup and resilience to their employees, and the notion to not worry as much.
OneDrive quickly wove into the fabric of their workplace.
A big outcome was that they didn’t have to worry about device crashes or being lost. The files are backed up and accessible from anywhere and any device. Device crash - no worries. Lost device - not an issue. Getting back to work comes quick when OneDrive has your back(up). It improves desktop compliance, too.
“I no longer save anything on my hard drive. Once I create a file, it autosaves, and I can share it with anyone externally or internally from within any of the other Office 365 apps. I don’t have to keep track of things on my desktop—it’s extremely easy.” - Benita Bankson, Senior Director of Employee Enablement - Gap Inc.
Read the full OneDrive Gap Inc. case study.
Aviation giant: Textron - a PDF-to-mobile pilot program with pilots
10,000+ employees
Being in ‘airplane mode,’ for most of us, means being offline. But for pilots, this must mean remaining connected - to people and information.
Best known for its aviation brands - including Bell Helicopter, Cessna, and Beechcraft - Textron also runs a network of defense, industrial, and finance businesses. With OneDrive, Textron IT staff found it easier to control access and maintain visibility into access by external users. Office 365 offered a secure, common user experience when working with others on a variety of file types - primarily Office documents and PDFs.
"It was exciting to see how much our employees liked OneDrive after deployment. They really appreciate how the mobile app works with all the Office applications. We’ve also freed up a lot of storage space on personal computers." - Cole Weatherson, Cloud Analyst - Textron (now employed as a Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft)
Textron started with a pilot program for OneDrive - working directly with pilots. They had a requirement to download hundreds of PDFs from OneDrive to mobile devices to use during test flights - to annotate documents on the go in the air, without a wireless connection. The early success led Textron to work with Microsoft FastTrack team to plan the migration of up to 200 pilots in the next wave.
Read the full OneDrive Textron case study.
Ambitious modernization for the City of London Corporation
3,000 employees
The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City, supporting a diverse and sustainable London within a globally-successful UK.
They were facing an out-of-date IT. They needed to refresh and modernize their on-premises systems, while migrating email, storage, and collaboration to more flexible, cloud-based platform. In stepped Office 365, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
Like Textron above, the City of London coordinated their file migration with a shift to Windows 10 across all employees. They successfully migrated everyone to new Exchange mailboxes and OneDrive cloud storage, while ensuring that all their existing work-related content moved with them.
“We had an ambitious vision to transform digital working across the City of London Corporation using Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 365. With a modern SharePoint intranet providing relevant and up-to-date information, along with team sites and OneDrive for knowledge sharing, collaboration and storage, our employees now have anytime, anywhere access to their digital content across any browser and device.” - Kevin Mulcahy, Head of IT - City of London Corporation
Read the full OneDrive City of London case study, as published by Microsoft partner, Agilisys.
Bonus episode of Sync Up - a OneDrive podcast, “Customer Success”
This relevant episode focuses on the importance of change management and product adoption - to help broad customer success, adoption, and get full value from their investments in OneDrive and Microsoft 365:
Final thoughts…
Maybe you will take this road more traveled by,
And I believe it shall make all the difference.
We continue to evolve OneDrive as a place - a yellow wood if you will - to access, share, and collaborate all your files in Microsoft 365, keeping them protected and readily accessible on all your devices, anywhere. And we learn from our customers - who in turn, we hope, learn from each other.
You’ll find similar customer stories and more at Microsoft Customer Evidence. Who knows, maybe your story will be there some day… I hope so.
Cheers, Mark “The road taken” Kashman
P.S. (Pun Sharing)
Get your eye rolls ready to bake… one pun from me, @mkashman 🙄, and one from the world:
