Autopolis deploys its new environment

Selected at the end of 2019, Autopolis’ new collaboration and communication environment became operational just as the Covid-19 pandemic was forcing companies to urgently find new ways of working. Luis Trindade, IT Manager at Autopolis, explains how his company leveraged the new tools deployed by Proximus NXT to strengthen its resilience, increase its agility and accelerate its transformation.

An obvious choice

“Our needs were varied,” explains Luis Trindade. “Every year in October, we present the projects and budgets for the following financial year to Autopolis’ management. For 2020, we considered various projects, but they were all interconnected.”

“The first issue we wanted to address was managing the mailboxes in our messaging system, which had become genuinely time-consuming.” 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 continuous increase in mailbox sizes.

“We also wanted to better manage our Microsoft Office licences and, above all, equip ourselves with a modern collaboration tool, like our automotive manufacturer partners who were already using videoconferencing tools,” he adds. “Given these requirements, moving to Microsoft 365 seemed like the obvious choice, and we presented it to management.”

Challenges to overcome

“However, we had to deal with several challenges,” Autopolis’ IT Manager explains. Before the migration, Autopolis had to upgrade its entire IT estate to Windows 10. But things quickly became more complicated: “We encountered issues with the supply of IT equipment,” he recalls. “And around the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.”

Faced with the urgency of the situation, the company quickly activated its hosting in Proximus NXT’s U-flex 3.0 cloud environment. “At the same time,” says Luis Trindade, “we began migrating our mailboxes and upgrading our IT estate. And all of this was done, sometimes remotely and sometimes on-site. In parallel, we had to implement remote-working solutions for our employees.”
Hybrid cloud

“For several years, our infrastructure had been hosted in a private cloud,” recalls the IT Manager. “It therefore seemed perfectly natural to move towards a hybrid cloud solution in order to transition to the public cloud with confidence.” Once again, Microsoft 365 proved to be a wise choice, especially as the IT team had to migrate its entire MS Exchange messaging system and needed a toolbox on which to build and implement its projects.

An operational environment from the start of the crisis

“We created a Teams environment as soon as lockdown began, which enabled us to facilitate and streamline internal communication,” explains Luis Trindade.
Today, the new environment hosted in Proximus NXT’s hybrid cloud is fully operational, and the mailbox migration has been completed. “We are still in a learning and training phase,” he explains, “but we use Microsoft 365 tools on a daily basis, particularly Teams for communication and collaboration, as well as the Stream video service for creating multimedia content and training users.”

Autopolis’ video testimonial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF8NVqZxYn8&t=5s