Formed in 1887 and headquartered in Johannesburg, SA, Gold Fields engages in the acquisition, exploration, development and production of gold mines. It holds interests in eight operating gold mines in Africa, Australia and South America. In addition to the mines, the company also maintains offices in the US, Canada and the Philippines.
At Gold Fields, employees rely on Microsoft Office applications to capture, manage, analyse and share information, such as mining and financial data, with each other and with business partners. Gold Fields uses Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for e-mail, and some offices use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for internal collaboration.
Because the workforce at Gold Fields is globally dispersed, the IT team had difficulty tracking the version of Office - Office 2003, Office 2007 or Office 2010 - individual employees were using, which made it difficult to maintain and manage updates.
"We support about 8 000 employees for everything from desktop applications such as Office, to enterprise solutions such as Exchange Server," says Ridwan Jadwat, infrastructure and operations manager at Gold Fields. "Maintaining consistent versions of software for users geographically dispersed around the world was quite a challenge."
In many cases, the IT staff would send someone to remote sites to physically install Office software. Because they would have to take control of the employee's PC for a few hours, this install task would disrupt employee productivity.
To help employees be more productive at their jobs, Gold Fields started to support a "bring your own device" policy, but the resulting demand from employees to provide Office for multiple devices also proved to be a challenge.
"Employees might be working on a document at the office, and then they want to go outside the office or home and continue working. We supported e-mail connectivity services to multiple devices, but not much beyond that," explains Jadwat. "In addition, the list of devices we are requested to support grows on a daily basis."
When Gold Fields learned about the next generation of Microsoft Office, it was interested in deploying the software to provide the latest capabilities and to get employees on the same version, but it was concerned that application compatibility issues could disrupt business. In addition, by deploying the latest release of Office, the company still faced the challenge of how to provide support for a growing number of devices without incurring additional licensing costs. Then the company learned about Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus, the full client version of Office that is delivered as a service to help keep employees on the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and more.
* Article courtesy of Microsoft. To read the full article, click here.
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