How Clarins leverages TeamsFox and its services to gain control over its Microsoft 365 environment.
Since its introduction two years ago, the TeamsFox solution has become a vital governance tool for Clarins. It is essential for the day-to-day activities of our Digital Workplace and imperative for ensuring the homogeneity of our users’ collaboration capabilities.
Launched in 2019 on a global scale, the use of Teams combined with the O365 ecosystem have progressively tripled; a strong natural growth took place during the COVID-related lock-down period, remote work and then hybrid work models adoption by our company.
The standard Microsoft O365 solution provides raw data and indicators that can be used. However, this solution offers only basic data or insights and companies are quickly confronted with limitations.
To overcome such limitations and provide more advanced reports and insights to our stakeholders, we first performed heavy and time-consuming processing via Excel. But even though this process was mostly automated, everyone knew that Excel couldn’t be a viable solution.
An ad-hoc solution soon became crucial for our team, and this concept was confirmed by the gradual development of APIs offered by Microsoft to reach these data.
Our main objectives:
- Make use of compiled metrics, easily accessible and easily usable (efficiency rule)
- Analyze trends and usages for each application, via KPIs but also dynamic graphs up and ready for analysis and interpretation
- Reach a finer granularity for each entity, by type of user profile, by time range, by O365 product, etc
- Enable us to not only observe behaviors and trends but also to set our strategic orientations accordingly (corrective usage trajectories, communication of best practices intended for our ambassadors & users, etc.)
In this context, the TEAMSFOX cloud application proposed by DataHorizon was integrated into our decision-making process during 2020; we were taking part in regular discussions with the DataHorizon teams about our requirements plus recurring actions, and our ambition was to obtain a robust and evolutive solution that could meet our future requirements:
The TeamFox platform – then under development – confirmed this common vision, taking the exercise further by proposing a scalable and future-proof solution that can address the needs of any organization running on O365.
Early 2021 - Clarins as a pioneer being the first customer to run on TEAMSFOX!
Immediate benefits: the scope of this first version was first restricted to TEAMS + SharePoint Online, enhanced with key metrics and O365 dashboards:
- A daily update of data from our Clarins tenant
- Instantaneous access to data/graphs/analytics
- Total reliability and highest quality standards of the information displayed, as processing is now fully automated in the back office
- Multi-pillar alerts for better governance, with instant identification of:
- Teams without owners: some teams can no longer be managed by any owner and the accounts of the original ones may have been deactivated due to their removal from the company
- Teams that have been inactive for more than 30 days, 60 days, 180 days, or any other period: a decision can be made to remove them with the agreement of their owner if they are considered useless (CSR measure). Otherwise, they will be kept if their owner justifies the reason (e.g. archiving, temporary hold of team activities before resuming, etc.)
- Teams including external guests : these profiles always require major attention from team owners, for obvious reasons including information security; such external profiles must be deactivated if they are no longer contractually active
- Public teams: when creating their team, owners sometimes select this public team format mistakenly, and in this case, some information could be highly exposed
- Automatic notification campaigns via easily configured emails : sent every quarter, they allow us to target our users very precisely to remind them of guidelines, rules, and recommendations that apply to their respective teams.
- Undeniable benefits :
- Productivity on the one hand:
- With a gain of 1.5 person-days per month on the processing/return side
- And a saving of 5 person-days per quarter on the user notification/tracking side
- Governance and Security on the other hand, with all management tools now available to ensure a high level of security following Clarins standards (ISO 27001).
- Productivity on the one hand:
2021-2022: TEAMSFOX keeps its promises by adding many new crucial features
Always listening to the initiatives and needs expressed by their customer, the agility combined with the expertise of the DataHorizon teams has proven itself successful: the roadmap timelines have all been fulfilled, with a commitment to flawless results. When scalability meets quality, there is no longer any doubt about the judicious choice of the product and its supplier!
Additional advanced analytics and insights with clear call-to-action:
- Immediate identification of AD (Active Directory) account profiles:
- Incomplete: lack of Countries, Services, Managers, etc
- Incoherent concerning corporate naming rules: outcome of corporate standards that might sometimes not be properly applied (e.g. Autriche vs. Austria, FRANCE vs. France, España vs. Spain, etc.)
- OneDrive: includes dynamic dashboards to monitor usage & activity on this key O365 component, both in terms of users and files but also the volume of storage.
- O365 License Management: a major pillar allowing us to drastically reduce the cost of our Office 365 licenses:
Most certainly one of the highest ranked features in TEAMSFOX, with important cost-saving potential in the short- to mid-term forecasts, whereby we can analyze in great detail various operating trends and usages for all licenses granted to our users. Based on the findings, we currently adjust either by downgrading our license pool, by reallocating licenses that are more in line with our users’ real requirements (e.g., license plan E3 -> F3 or F1); or even by removing large volumes of licenses that are 100% unused over long periods.
Very promising already, this section is progressively developing further with new insights and automated data processing features; the objective is to contribute to generating regular inventories to enable Clarins – or any other corporate client – to optimize its pool of licenses and = as a result, achieve significant economies of scale.
2022 and beyond! CSR and GREEN IT
Protecting the environment, biodiversity and our global ecosystem are intrinsic values of the Clarins brand. As a leader in this mindset, this social and environmental responsibility has been part of the Group’s DNA since its creation.
Therefore, our role and responsibility are not only to be able to measure in a realistic and explainable manner the carbon footprint (CO²) impacts caused by the use of our solutions, but also to make them easily exploitable so that corrective measures or possible adjustments can be implemented progressively. This may sound complex.
DATAHORIZON wins again the challenge: Thanks to a new GREEN IT section in TEAMSFOX, many measurements and estimates are now available in real-time and on a yearly projection basis:
- No hidden secrets about the carbon footprint of our O365 Clarins practices: whether considering Exchange messaging, TEAMS as a true strategic pillar of the collaboration workplace (meetings, calls, screens + contents sharing and teamwork, etc.), cloud storage for SharePoint Online/OneDrive/Teams, etc., all are now closely scrutinized.
- All these metrics have become a powerful source of information and are closely monitored and used by the “Responsible Development” team along with some Clarins managers. The next step shall be to communicate the findings more extensively with our users for educational purposes and to raise awareness of possible collective and individual actions that could gradually reverse these trends.
- This GREEN IT section allows Clarins to achieve its CSR objectives following the standards (ISO 26000).
In addition, for those who could still doubt the credibility and reliability of these metrics, it is important to note that all the formulas integrated into the product compile the results of more than 30 reference sources and organizations that are worldwide-recognized. The predictive models also available in TEAMSFOX are the result of long-term work led by DataHorizon.
In conclusion:
recognized in 2021 with the state label “Young Innovative Company”, the DataHorizon teams can proudly promote their TEAMSFOX solution. Fulfilling all the commitment criteria that Clarins had originally established, this solution is imperative – sometimes even addictive – for those who can operate successfully in a global O365 environment.
TEAMSFOX will continue to grow in maturity over the coming years: the roadmap showcased by DataHorizon includes many new surprises to be revealed, and some unexpected components will for sure continue making this product a huge success !
“ When scalability meets quality, there is no longer any doubt about the judicious choice of the product and its supplier ! ”
Stéphane Lemarchand, Digital Workplace Solutions Manager, Clarins
