As Microsoft is on a mission to empower everyone to achieve more, the Office team has been busy showcasing how Office 365 is a scalable solution that can fit the needs of everyone from personal business owners to Fortune 500 companies. Over the last few months, the company has been sharing several use cases (from a museum to a personal stylist to a local police department) that concretely explain how moving to the cloud can allow an organization to be more productive with cost effective solutions.
In a new blog post today, deputy mayor at Câmara Municipal de Cascais Miguel Pinto Luz reveals how the municipal government transformed from a paper-based, compartmentalized organization to a “digital government.”
“I value technology that puts our government ahead of the curve,” explained the deputy Mayor. On their road to digitization, the municipality chose Office 365 over Google because it was a more familiar interface that bode well for user adoption:
After a head-to-head competition, we chose Microsoft Office 365 to deliver a set of tools that our 2,000 employees can easily adapt to how they work on any device, boosting productivity when and where they need to work. This benefit takes us a long way toward one of our main goals for the future: delivering a modern workplace where people can accomplish more with less resources and still achieve better services for our citizens.
The Azure computing environment and the Office 365 business productivity suite also offered both the flexibility and the security and privacy policies that are needed in public administration. “Microsoft Azure delivers a trusted cloud computing environment to store our data, but we retain the control we need over our content so we can meet our compliance needs”, explained Pinto Luz.
While many of the municipality employees didn’t previously have a corporate email address, all 2,000 employees are now using Microsoft Exchange Online, with approximately 500 field workers using smartphones to access their city email. Furthermore, nearly 400 employees are now using Skype for Business Online for instant messaging and presence awareness and 1,000 employees are also using Microsoft Planner to better organize their group initiatives.
Lastly, the municipality will also soon benefit from a revamped intranet based on SharePoint Online associated with Microsoft’s enterprise social network solution Yammer. The Deputy Mayor is confident that the municipality has done the right choice:
As we see employees embrace the online collaboration functionalities and realize improved efficiencies, it becomes clear that Office 365 is an instigating factor in achieving a digital culture change that’s lasting. Microsoft cloud services are definitely part of the future at Câmara Municipal de Cascais, so we’ll be able to deliver faster, better services to achieve our goal of improving the quality of life for our citizens.
You can read the full use case here.
Further reading: Government, Microsoft, Office 365, Organizations, productivity
