BT is to roll out Facebook-style social networking services to its 100,000 employees, in a move it says will help staff collaborate more effectively on projects, whether they are in the office or working remotely.

The company, which reported a £1m profit this month, says the system will lead to significant gains in productivity and help the organisation keep track of the skills of its workforce.

BT is an early adopter of Microsoft’s business collaboration platform, Sharepoint 2010. It is using the platform to build advanced social networking and collaboration tools, which will be rolled out across the organisation between now and the end of the year.

The project is part of a wider programme that will see BT replace between 30,000 and 40,000 Windows XP desktops with Windows 7 by the end of 2010. At the same time, the company plans to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010, in a move that it pre-dicts will bring further productivity benefits.

Efficiency gainsPeter Scott, BT’s chief technology officer for end-user technology, is responsible for providing these infrastructure services. He says BT is such a large organisation that even small improvements to its IT infrastructure can bring huge efficiency gains when multiplied across the whole organisation.

“We have challenges around our cost base, where we want to reduce overall how much it costs us to do things. We want to do things in a smarter way. We want the outcome to be better than before,” he says. “A toolset like Sharepoint, which allowed us to underpin all of that, we saw as a very powerful business enabler.”

The company has developed two powerful social networking tools that it plans to roll out to staff over the coming months as it upgrades its infrastructure from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010.

The first will offer each employee of BT a Facebook-like profile page. It promises to make it easier for BT staff to find the right experts within the company for the projects they are working on. They will be able to see at a glance what projects, and even what documents, other members of staff are working on.

“It brings some of the social networking elements into our business. People can expose much more information in real time. It is going to allow people to get plugged into other people and discover what other things are going on, and where the people are with the skills and experience that would help them,” he says.

Collaboration and re-use The second tool, known as Dealpoint, will help BT staff to manage bids for contracts.BT plans to use the tool to bring together in one electronic meeting place information about projects that was previously dispersed throughout the company in e-mails and spread-sheets on multiple PCs. Designers, project managers, and finance specialists will be able to collaborate as the bid progresses, and gain access to all the documentation.

Dealpoint provides the project teams with dashboards which will give them a clear view of which projects are behind schedule, what parts of the project have been completed and what has yet to be done.

And, just as importantly, the tool will allow BT staff to re-use material gathered for one contract bid for use in future bids.

“Historically it has been quite challenging to re-use the investment in making one bid on the next bid. Because we are doing this in Sharepoint, we are going to be able to use

Case studyBT rolls out Microsoft Sharepoint 2010

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BT’s systems

Windows 7 at BT

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by Bill Goodwin

the intellectual property we create in going through that process a lot more,” says Scott. “Which means when we come to do something else that is similar, rather than put in all the effort and work in to re-doing the bid, we will be able to reuse elements.”

Some 500 BT staff have been using the system to manage contract bids since it went live in November. The early results are encouraging, says Scott.

“We have seen a tremendous return on that,” he says. “And really that has enabled a group of people from across BT to work much more effectively.”

BT plans to extend its roll-out of Sharepoint from the pilot across the whole company by the end of the year. In addition to the dedicated tools BT has developed, staff will be able to use the system to create their own shared workspaces when they work together on any project.

Business caseScott says he did not feel the need to put together a formal business case for the project. Collaboration tools are now an essential part of BTs infrastructure, and living without them would be like living without e-mail, he says.

“We would struggle to operate as a business without instant messaging and e-mail. Those things have become utilities that everyone gets. It is part of doing your work, like a phone and a laptop. Collaboration tools are the same,” he says.

And because BT has an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, the costs of the software roll-out are small. BT is minimising hardware costs by hosting Sharepoint on its internal cloud of virtualised servers.

“We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so this does not become a big expensive project. It is very much more an incremental evolution of our infrastructure,” says Scott.

“Historically we had dedicated servers that might have sat their doing nothing all day. Now those servers are sitting on virtualised infrastructure, so we can sit other things on the same servers. The infrastructure investment for this project is very low.”

BT paved the way for the project 18 months ago when it joined Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Programme (TAP). Microsoft worked with the company to help it understand the capabilities on Sharepoint, provided it with early copies of the software and worked to help BT exploit its capabilities.

Scott says deploying the technology has been relatively painless. There was only one significant hiccup, when one version of Sharepoint had difficulties accessing BT’s large staff directory.

“Microsoft recognised that as a problem. And they gave us some workarounds within

Office 2010 at BT

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24 hours. They used that to work out why the product was not behaving as they would want it. And they changed the code and came back with another beta release to resolve that,” he says.

Migration from Sharepoint 2007BT plans to make the Sharepoint 2010 platform live over the next few weeks. The system will run in parallel with Sharepoint 2007, which will be shut down by the end of the year. People will be able to migrate material from the old system to the new one if they need to.

“I think we will probably have 40,000 or 50,000 people using Sharepoint. It could be even more than that for the BT profile. We could be talking about 60,000 or 70,000 people,” says Scott.

Scott predicts he will have no difficulty in persuading BT staff to migrate to the new version of Sharepoint.

“You only have to do a short demo of Sharepoint 2010 and people really start to bite your arm off for it,” he says. “You sit in a room with people and you show it to them. After a little while you almost see people’s lights go on –‘I could do that.’ People get very excited about it.”

Additional resources for IT departments

Forrester report: Total Economic Impact of Implementing Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010

A 5,000-strong professional services company could expect to gain a return on in-vestment for rolling out Sharepoint Server 2010 within nine months, claims a Forrester study, sponsored by Microsoft.

The study, based on interviews with 11 Microsoft customers, concludes that organisa-tions can achieve significant financial benefits from consolidating collaboration, docu-ment management, internal and external software portals, and search into Sharepoint Server 2010.

Sharepoint 2010 can help organisations reduce the number of suppliers they need to work with and reduce licensing costs. Upgrading from Sharepoint 2002 and Share-point 2007 can lower IT administration costs and simplify application development, it says.

The report identifies the key benefits for rolling out Sharepoint Server 2010 as:

Lower software and hardware upgrade costs for the collaboration platform.1. Sharepoint 2010’s document management capabilities mean there is no need for 2. organisations to replace their existing document management platform.Organisations can save money by using the portal capabilities of Sharepoint 3. 2010, rather than their own portal.Organisations need fewer resources for IT administration and application devel-4. opment.Benefits from improved collaboration, user productivity and process efficiency.5.

Download the Forrester report on the Total Economic Impact of Implementing Micro-soft Sharepoint Server 2010 here >>

Forrester report: Total Economic Impact of Implementing Microsoft Office 2010

This Microsoft-sponsored study by Forrester claims that an organisation with 5,000 users can achieve a return on investment for Office 2010 within three to five months.

Benefits of standardisation

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The report identifies the main benefits of rolling out Office 2010 as:

Co-authoring tools allow staff to work on sales proposals and bidding documents 1. more productively.OneNote allows project teams to capture and organise project information, includ-2. ing meeting notes, e-mails, photos and handwritten notes into one shared note-book.Eliminating the need for third-party video and editing tools generates savings.3. Productivity gains come from the new features of Office 2010.4.

Download Forrester report on the Total Economic Impact of Implementing Microsoft Office 2010 here >>

Forrester report: Total Economic Impact of Implementing Microsoft’s Productivity Platform

This Microsoft-sponsored study by Forrester claims that a 5,000-user business can achieve a return on investment in about seven months for installing Sharepoint 2010, Office 2010, and other Microsoft collaboration tools.

The report argues that collaboration tools can make a huge difference to the productiv-ity of an organisation. Giving someone even five minutes more productive time a day means a 1% increase in their overall productivity. For a company with 3,000 information workers, that is equivalent to having 30 more people without increasing the headcount, it says.

Forrester calculates that a 5,000-user business could achieve a saving of 3.96% of each employee’s time, which is equivalent to $7m in benefits over three years. The study is based on an organisation that deploys Microsoft Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 together.

Productivity gains come from:

Less switching between applications.1. Being able to check whether team members are available through presence 2. features.Making it easier to find documents, skills and knowledge.3. Better e-mail management. 4. Applications and features can be accessed more easily.5. Improved reporting for business intelligence users.6.

Download the Forrester report on the Total Economic Impact of Implementing Micro-soft’s Productivity Platform here >>

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