Bytes engaged bluesource to assist them with their Teams pilot

Bytes Software Services (Bytes) engaged bluesource Information Ltd (bluesource) to assist with a pilot for Teams. At the heart of bluesource’s approach is a Teams lifecycle management system which encompasses several business workflows to automate the provisioning, in-life changes, and disposition of Teams sites.  This is all wrapped up in an approval mechanism.

The bluesource approach: Teams Lifecycle Automation

This approach ensures the management of Teams is automated as much as possible. In addition, flexibility, and protection with respect to Teams sites is delivered and adherence to naming conventions implemented to ensure that nothing can be deleted by accident. As a result, the impact of Teams sprawl and duplication within the business was substantially reduced.

Workshop

A design and configuration workshop was held to discuss the requirements; a key success criterion was that the final solution will be used to collaborate and share information between Bytes and their customers. A policy-driven approach was adopted to control which features were made available at any given time. Teams creation was based on templates to further encourage standardisation; the solution also needed to ensure data can be classified and retained as appropriate in accordance with the Bytes information security policies. The solution had to co-exist with the on-prem Skype solution and not impede it. This was required so that Bytes could take a structured and managed migration approach, as standard practice. Bytes also did not want to run what would in effect be two instant messaging systems and it was necessary for Teams and Skype to talk to each other and for Bytes to be able to talk with their customers.

Support

During the pilot, bluesource provided support to respond to any Teams-related questions, provided reactive configuration changes where appropriate following user acceptance testing feedback and produced a user guide for the implemented solution, showing ‘How To’ for each in-scope workflow. bluesource also provided guidance for the configuration of data loss prevention polices for Teams data.

“The help and support bluesource gave us was excellent and we are now enjoying the benefits of improved collaboration within a strong governance and data management framework.”

Keith Richardson, CFO Bytes