Standardizing Use of Office 365

Dear colleagues,

As you know, we are currently working on modernizing our IT landscape. One important measure is to standardize use of Office 365.

For this purpose, we would like to give you a short update on current developments:

In June, we completed moving the mailboxes to the cloud and installing Office 365 to computers privately used by PI employees.

Now, for traditional storage of files to network drives, we are starting to move department and network drives to SharePoint Online. For this purpose, we are currently setting up storage structures, and coordinating activities with individual areas. One of the most important advantages of SharePoint Online is that several users can access and work on files at the same time. Moving to SharePoint is an important measure towards offering employees at PI a clear document storage structure. Of course, a migration will not take place without prior coordination with the departments in question.

Additionally, at our headquarters in Karlsruhe we are currently testing Teams telephony with the landline numbers. We consider this function to have many advantages regarding workplace mobility, as, no matter if employees are working at PI locations or are working from home, in both cases they can be reached with their PI devices using their landline numbers.

We are trying to prepare and move to standardized usage of Office 365 as smoothly as possible, however, we ask for your support.

Best regards
Steffen Amann
Manager IT Infrastructure – Global