On today's show We meet the IT crew from Lotus F1 Team
to explore their implementation of Office 365
It’s the middle of the race season and all focus is first and foremost on making the car
faster so technology decisions and change management are not taken lightly
Over 20% of the workforce here is highly mobile, either racing, testing or designing the
car or managing team logistics and operations This is the first in a series of shows, we’ll follow
the IT team to explore how they are starting
to tackle mobility as well as their longer-term aspirations including work automation
and BI (Business Intelligence) I in addition to file sharing
Microsoft Office
Office Mechanics
To learn more about the operational environment of the Lotus F1 Team and their technology
goals for Office 365 I first met with COO Thomas Mayer
Formula 1 is all about speed, agility, making better performance.
Mobility is a key aspect for us it’s in the DNA of the team, we are traveling every
race. Technology has to be mobile, if it’s not mobile and not supporting mobility
it is of no use for us
Ultimately we just want to make people's time more efficient and give them more time to
make the car faster. Because we want to have all of their attention focused on the car
and making the car faster. It’s the ultimate goal in the Formula 1 team.
So what are your aspirations with Office 365 and how do you see that playing a role in the future?
In the future we want to use Office 365 much more in terms of using the communications
possibilities we have but also it offers us a lot of power in terms of PowerBI
We can visualize all kinds of technical data because we are streaming 200 channels on a
car that will make our lives that much easier.
So lot's on the shoulders of the IT team which is around 25 to 30 people. Thomas described
a performance driven culture so technology can't be evasive but needs to help people speed up
their daily tasks and be secure. It's been around a year since the IT team implemented
the first two Office 365 workloads to around 500 users only in a matter of a few weeks
whereas the goal of Formula 1 is to shed every ounce and pound of the car, here the goal
is to gradually reduce physical IT infrastructure
so we're taking a break from the day to day to catch up with the IT crew at the Lotus
F1 Team. So Michael, why don't you tell us about where you got started in terms of mobility decisions?
Our organization is spread far and wide across the globe. Over 100 users travel to
20 races in 20 different countries and they need to work remotely. It's really very simple.
Our vision is to provide secure robust access to any piece of information on any device
anywhere in the world
and where do you start in terms of your implementation?
so it really started with email. Because email is logical, everyone lives in email still.
that said though, we did take the view that we wanted to include the facility to have presence based
information and also IM connectivity
we actually ran an on-premise solution which was very resource intensive
and we're quite a lean team. So it was very very logical as a staffing point to move the project forward
I know Dave you've done a lot of the implementation so where do you start there in terms of implementation?
Well Active Directory is the first place we have to get the authentication worked out.
it doesn't make sense for our users to have a different username and password to log on
to email as it does to log on to things on-premise, VPN, on the network here. So we looked at Active Directory
federation services, ADFS, to see if that could solve that problem and we found that actually going
to add more complexity to the environment and we'd end up adding more servers making them highly
available and it doesn't make sense to us to have a cloud offering when it depends
on something running here. So we looked at using password hash sync within the Azure
Active Directory sync tool to enable password sync. It's just this checkbox down here within the tool
so that's a standard Azure Active Directory sync and basically what that will do is run every
couple of hours, it will sync all user objects from your AD up into the cloud and also passwords
as they are changed pretty much dynamically as those changes take place
Azure AD sync and password hash sync really met your needs?
from my perspective it's very very easy to setup as we've just seen with the demo
it's easy to keep running and it gives us the 99.99% up time that the organization craves and needs
so then after Active Directory did you then migrate mailboxes?
yes it was on to the migration stage. Previously we were running a on premises Exchange 2010 service
pack two system I can show you the layout here that we had
and as you can see there's about 18 different components that we had to manage and look
after from the top there we've got internal mail coming from the internet so we've got
Edge transport servers they have to handle all the hygiene. We've got reverse proxies
mobile victors to handle connectivity for external users on their mobiles. There's
more hygiene, unified messaging and that's before we get to the client access servers
internally on our network. The internal Outlook clients connect to those most of the other
systems do the archiving and down really the core of the system is the database availability
group multiple nodes of that and all of the associated storage connected to that to make
the databases highly available. Each one of those items represents quite a significant
undertaking and admin overhead for all of the IT department making sure the backups are
working making sure the application is working without any problems. Moving to 365 really
took the complexity out of the architecture
so huge opportunity there, how long did it take you Michael then to start migrating?
it surprised me, it actually only took about a week the first night we decided we would
do the first set of migrations after hours. We didn't want to impact on the data of the
users we quickly realized that it was very low impact so we continued then live during
the day migrating users
and once you deployed your environment got a lot simpler I presume as opposed to that
18 different component environment
much simpler
this shows the solution after we migrated everyone to 365 and decommissioned all of
the on-premise servers. So you can see there is only really four items here to look after
three of which we consider not to be critical only the directory sync server is the critical
part there and that we can do without for a short length of time if we need to it doesn't
if we have down time here at the factory we don't impact on our users over race
So what are the things that got easier?
well the amount of time that we have to look after everything exchange related now has
gone from hours a week down to maybe half an hour at the most. The latest admin tool
from Office 365 we can login we can take a look at all the health status of the service
at the moment and we can even go in and edit some of the users on mobile as we're they're
out and about
really great compliment to Active Directory synchronization and the password hash sync
yes definitely it makes it very seamless
So Michael, how did users react to the changes with Office 365?
the main thing is the technology didn't get in the way of the users
It’s definitely a big improvement, we don’t need to worry about storage With the amount
of emails we get, again because it is 24/7 as you can imagine the hardest part was hitting
the one gig limit We were spending probably an hour to an hour a half a week clearing
everything out.
now that we’ve moved on and I don’t have to do that I can keep more information which
makes my job a lot easier
You know they are able to continue working in exactly the same way as they had before
they just don't know that they're messaging storage is now based in the cloud somewhere
out in the wider world and they can access everything they need wherever they are in
terms of things like OWA the compatibility in the usability improvements from 2010 to
2013 have gone down really well that combined with the mobile apps IOS and Android that's
really brought them out to life on those devices
and how do you manage mobile devices?
well we issue Lumia 1520's to all traveling staff and they use those as their device but
we actually found very quickly that all of our staff come from a technical background
and they started making better use of the other types of devices Android IOS and we
can actually run PowerShell commands to get that kind of information and see what people are using
using get mobile device Cmdlet I've got connections here to our tenant already so here is the
raw file there's the CSV output from the PowerShell from there we can make use of Excel and here
we can look at actually a breakdown of all the different types of device
I know this move to mobile really helps in terms of immediacy around communications but
let's switch gears a little bit for Skype for Business cause a lot of people here are
using that too right?
Yeah everyone in the organization is enabled for Skype for Business initially for presence-based
reporting and instant messaging we've obviously expanded that into using live meetings and
those types of good things the future of the solution is very much around enterprise voice
we've already started an extended pilot within the IT department our vision is very
very simple remove the desk phone from all our users
so Dave how did you implement Skype for Business and what did that deployment look like?
well for us this is really a hybrid setup for the moment the great thing about Skype
for Business is that it comes with a planning tool so we can just plug in the information
that we want, the number of users and all the types of features that we want and that will
go away and work out the best kind of topology that is recommended to us at the end of that
this will output a diagram of all of the infrastructure you need to make that work
I know you set some policies as well around for example being able to protect attachments
and link conversations so those you can manage as well
yes that's very important to us and through the different policies in there we can say
whether you can use file attachments or send files to each other according to the location
you are currently in
so how does all this link with your mobile devices and mobile clients?
so for all of our mobile users they automatically have the link client installed on their mobile
devices it makes a huge difference for them they one click to join a meeting don't have
to go into a conference bridge and then have to enter a participant code and passcodes
and all that
good riddance
yeah effectively it opens up a whole new way for people to connect
One of the things we’ve started doing is using it as a real-time communication between
the engine people and the fuel man we call him the guy who puts the fuel in the car at
the end of each run. In the past we’ve had problems with the noise and we used to audio
of radio and there has been some miscommunications. So what we actually do now is, the
engineer will use Skype for Business, write down the fuel amounts, that will be confirmed
back and we’ve had no problems since we started doing that.
Whenever there is a problem the guys can click have an instant video call on hand it's mobile
they can walk with the tablet they can video the problematic part they can put an endoscope
to show the video to their colleagues at the factory it's in fact instant it's a great
value for us
there’s so much going on and to have something just flash up, it has just simplified incredibly everything
I know it's bee really great progress in terms of what you've done so far with Lync and Exchange
Online but where are you looking to move next?
The next phase for us is how we can roll out OneDrive for Business how we can utilize the
new features the new management and compliance control tools we're really excited to see
the new device management features which are now coming to OneDrive
How about beyond OneDrive are you looking at other stuff
yeah absolutely , we're already looking at how we can automate work processes and leverage
the platform that is Office 365 on top of that naturally our leadership are already
looking at PowerBI for reporting purposes so there's a very exciting journey ahead of us
On our next visit to the Lotus F1 Team we'll join them for their journey to enabling secure
file sync and share until next time goodbye for now
Office Mechanics
Microsoft Office • Office.com/Mechanics