Power and automation technology company ABB is migrating to Microsoft's Office 365 on demand cloud-based productivity suite and the Yammer enterprise social networking platform for its employees worldwide.
With about 145,000 employees in 100 countries, ABB is migrating from multiple IT collaboration and messaging solutions to Office 365, to provide a single platform for productivity, communication, collaboration and enterprise social networking in the cloud.
"Office 365 and Yammer will enable us to transform communication and collaboration among our employees, surfacing the best and most innovative ideas across the organisation," said Andy Tidd, CIO at ABB Group.
Office 365's mail service is integrated with online meeting and videoconferencing services, with Microsoft claiming that its implementation at large organisations like ABB can "typically reduce travel costs by 15 to 20 percent". Yammer is part of the Microsoft Office offering.
ABB was previously a big fan of "social email" software, using a system from harmon.ie as part of its effort to improve collaboration across the global business.
Prior to the implementation of harmon.ie, ABB's employees would access on average six to nine platforms to get their work done.
This required them to toggle between their IBM Lotus Notes email, various Microsoft Office applications, the instant messenger service from Sametime, web-based applications such as SAP, and file servers including eRoom, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 and Lotus Notes team rooms.
