See how Lionbridge achieved a rapid and smooth global Microsoft Teams rollout with AvePoint Cloud Governance.
Success Highlights
Customer Location Waltham, Massachusetts
Industry Translation and Localization
Platform Microsoft 365
Lionbridge Technologies, LLC. is a leading provider of translation and localization services. With over 25 years of experience, the company has helped organizations connect with their global customers and employees by delivering translation and localization solutions in 350+ languages. In addition to translation and localization services, Lionbridge also offers content creation, application development, and testing services. The company has operations in 23 countries and more than 6,000 employees around the world.
Critical Needs
- Control sprawl and reduce security risk
- Self-service workspace provisioning
- Automated lifecycle management
- User-friendly solution
The Challenge
When Lionbridge rolled out Microsoft Teams, they were determined to avoid the mistakes they made with their SharePoint environment. During their migration to SharePoint Online, they discovered they had thousands of sites and subsites, often without owners and with no way to confirm if they were active or dormant.
To ensure a successful rollout of Teams, Lionbridge needed to implement guardrails. However, they did not want to restrict growth or creation but rather control the lifecycle of the Teams sites.
While PowerShell scripts were a native solution, they required a significant amount of manual work and produced inconsistent results. This approach would also not allow them to enable self-service Teams creation, which was a critical need to facilitate better adoption and collaboration from employees.
The self-service workspace creation was the single biggest reason our Teams adoption was successful. With the Cloud Governance framework in place, users were empowered to build what they needed to perform their jobs, without asking for IT assistance and with necessary governance and control automatically enforced. This simplified the onboarding process and facilitated a quick and seamless global rollout.
Senior Director, Infrastructure, Lionbridge
The AvePoint Solution
AvePoint Cloud Governance was Lionbridge’s answer. Cloud Governance delivers a wide range of IT services while automating and controlling the management of content ownership, policies, and lifecycle according to evolving business needs.
Lionbridge was initially drawn to Cloud Governance for two capabilities: the automated lifecycle management, to avoid accumulating inactive sites like SharePoint, and the self-service Teams creation, to enhance productivity by enabling users to create their own workspaces.
“The self-service workspace creation was the single biggest reason our Teams adoption was successful,” says Benny Molby, Senior Director, Infrastructure at Lionbridge. “With the Cloud Governance framework in place, users were empowered to build what they needed to perform their jobs, without asking for IT assistance and with necessary governance and controls automatically enforced. This simplified the onboarding process and facilitated a quick and seamless global rollout.”
Currently, Lionbridge creates around 60 new sites a month, and the IT team hasn’t created one. The process is fully automated, with any necessary restrictions, such as size limits, naming conventions, and user access, already in place.
With the MyHub widget integrated directly within Teams, users can create new workspaces and manage Teams seamlessly without navigating multiple portals or submitting helpdesk tickets. This ease of use has resulted in zero helpdesk tickets related to Teams creation or management in the last six months.
With over 5,500 objects in Microsoft Teams alone, manually managing the lifecycle of these workspaces would be time-consuming and costly for Lionbridge. However, Cloud Governance has enabled them to streamline the provisioning process, ensure necessary governance and controls, and reduce the effort required for recertification of workspaces.
Automated lifecycle management has also played a crucial role in reducing Lionbridge's risk and addressing their concerns about inactive data. With TBs of data in their environment, managing inactive data could pose a significant security risk. The ability to automatically review, archive, and delete inactive workspaces has helped Lionbridge eliminate data that is not being used or worked on, making their security team very happy. According to Benny, “It's why we need AvePoint."
Overall, the time savings and reduction in risk have been significant.
The Road Ahead
By automating the necessary controls and data deletion, Cloud Governance has enabled Lionbridge to keep its environment safe and secure without compromising on productivity or user satisfaction.
The key to effective governance is simplicity, and Cloud Governance delivers just that. Now that Lionbridge employees are accustomed to self-service, they have come to expect similar standards from other IT services, which has pushed the helpdesk to automate more, driving innovation across the organization.
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