3M Races Forward to Enable Enterprise-Wide Collaboration (Part 1)

We’re very proud of our record of innovation here at 3M, and we are always striving to improve. 3M takes a very thoughtful approach to our IT deployments, balancing organizational disruption of new technology with user demand and the productivity enhancing potential it can bring. Microsoft delivered the tools to help us make our Office 365 ProPlus rollout fast and easy, even in a large, diverse environment like ours. Just four months after announcing our Office 365 direction to the company, we’ve deployed Office 365 ProPlus to more than 60,000 employees and nearly 6,000 mobile devices.

3M has a culture of creative collaboration that inspires powerful technologies—we continuously work to introduce new products that solve our customers’ challenges. The next great idea can come from anywhere in the company and our organization is most successful when ideas can flow easily, whether that’s between our global R&D centers, or a salesperson sharing a customer process with others in the organization.

After investing in collaboration solutions for more than 10 years—with each team picking their favorite—we had disconnected systems. It was taking too long for us to make the connections we needed internally or with customers, vendors, and distributors. Now, we’ll be able to improve and accelerate those connections by using Office 365 across the organization.

Our Sales and Marketing organizations eagerly anticipated the ability to use Office 365 on multiple devices. They typically use tablets during customer visits, and spend a lot of time converting presentations to PDF files so they display correctly. With Office now available on our mobile devices, salespeople can deliver presentations from any device and not worry about document fidelity.

We faced numerous application compatibility challenges when we moved from Office 2003 to Office 2007, and it took 18 months to complete that upgrade. Office 365 ProPlus provided a very different experience. After piloting the solution with key stakeholders we saw that cross version compatibility was far better than we had experienced in the past. There were a very small number of third-party applications we had to update overall.

We also made our lives easier by choosing to deploy Office 365 ProPlus in a side-by-side configuration with Office 2007. Keeping Office 2007 in place helped overcome the inevitable fear of change. We knew that everyone could keep working no matter what happened during the deployment. We’ll go back and remove Office 2007 in a few months once everyone is comfortable.