Staffing Services: The Details- What you need to know!

Staffing Services: The Details- What you need to know!

By: Amanda Hawthorne, Director of People and Culture at Managed Solution

So you’ve got an opening or resource need on your team? Exciting! Managed Solution’s Staffing Services can help! But knowing where to start with an outside recruiting firm can be tough, and you may have a lot of questions about the process…

There are plenty of choices for service providers: so how do you know which is going to deliver?

Sometimes the exact resource or budget requirements for your position may be a bit hazy, and you may still be sorting out how exactly a new hire will engage within your team. Who can help you define your needs and understand a market-realistic hiring budget?

Everyone is already stretched thin today, and no one has time to interview a series of candidates who completely miss the mark. Working with a trusted Staffing Service provider like Managed Solution can help you quickly connect with pre-vetted technical talent so you can make efficient staffing decisions and get back to work with the right team!

Why You Can Trust Managed Solution to Deliver Top Talent

Managed Solution is an IT service provider – which means IT people are our business. For over 20 years, we’ve been meeting talented engineers and connecting them with our clients across Southern California (and beyond!) to fulfill ongoing support or even project-based needs. In the age of remote work and the “Great Resignation,” it’s more important than ever to hire highly skilled and vetted engineering talent – and even harder to find them!

After hearing from client after client about the challenges they’re having in finding and vetting top talent, we saw an opportunity here: open our Talent Community to our clients, giving them access to the amazing people we’re meeting daily. (And as a bonus, individuals in our Talent Community have already been vetted by our Microsoft-certified engineers!)

Plus, since hiring our Talent Advisor, Kat Grunzinger, we now have a talent concierge to meet with our clients and really dive into their needs, to help define an opportunity for efficient recruiting. Kat has years of experience in the recruiting space and has a true knack for building quick rapport with candidates, diving into what they know (and don’t), as well as understanding what opportunities are truly of interest to them. She leverages this same inquisitive nature to consult with clients to understand what Staffing Services are best-suited to their needs – and which candidates will really fit the bill!

What You Need to Know When Getting Started with Managed Solution’s Talent Advisor

You may be asking, what’s it like to work with Managed Solution’s Talent Advisor?

Here’s what you can expect:

First, Our Talent Advisor will want to interview you! We’ve found the best way to understand the true needs of an organization isn’t to rely on a job description (which may be out of date or miss key aspects of what a position truly requires), but to go straight to the source: you!

As a hiring manager, you’ll have insight into your needs, your team, and your organization – even if you haven’t scoped out a formal job description yet, or if you haven’t gotten the chance yet to update the one that’s been on file for years.

Our Talent Advisor can help you outline the specific function that’s needed. She’ll be aiming to understand the ins and outs of your open role, so she can connect you to the right resources. Key questions she’ll ask include:

  1. What function or role will this person play in your organization or project? Do you need someone to take charge and lead a team? Someone to execute tasks already outlined in a project plan? Someone your end users can trust to solve their issues in a responsive and friendly manner?
  2. What skills & experience are essential for their success? Are you seeking a well-rounded IT generalist with demonstrated success in a particular industry? A helpdesk superstar already proficient with a specific ticketing system and Office365 administration? An SQL wizard?
  3. Who will this person interact with most often? What people skills would make someone most successful in those interactions? Every team has a different style, and Our Talent Advisor knows a successful candidate will be a value-add to your existing team culture. Is your team highly process oriented or working in a compliance-heavy environment? Operating in a start-up mentality where adaptability is key? Our Talent Advisor wants to know so we can present candidates who are ready to jump in and be successful!
  4. What is the available budget and target market for hiring? Are you looking for an onsite resource in your downtown Los Angeles office, or flexible to find someone fully remote from anywhere in the nation? Do you have budget for a full-time internal hire, or will you be looking to staff a temporary need with an external position on an hourly bill rate?

Our Talent Advisor will ask these key questions so she understands exactly what this individual will be doing on a day-to-day basis and how their success will be defined. This will help her articulate the opportunity to potential candidates - and help us avoid wasting your time with candidates who would fall short of expectations. This understanding will allow her to scroll through her mental Rolodex of people in our Talent Community so she can quickly connect you with any pre-vetted candidates that might align with your goals.

Understanding your needs can also help us align our Staffing Service offering with your ‘ask’ to ensure we’re helping you meet your need in a cost-effective manner.

How Managed Solution Approaches Staffing Services

Managed Solution offers several different Staffing Services to meet your IT hiring needs:

When our Talent Advisor meets with you to discuss your team’s needs, she’ll help you determine which Staffing Service is right for you.

How a Strong Rapport with Your Talent Advisor Helps You Hire Better, Faster

Once a Staffing Service Agreement is signed, she’ll begin sorting through our existing connections within our Talent Community and will reach out to appropriate passive candidates on your behalf.

When we find suitable candidates – aligned to your role in terms of experience, skills, location, culture, and career goals – we’ll pre-vet them with our Microsoft-certified engineers and then present you with their talent profiles (a fancy term for their resumes, catered to your position). Ideally, they’ll all look good on paper, and then it’s time for you and your teams to interview!

Our Talent Advisor will work with you to define your own vetting process for the opening – who will be involved in the interviews; when/how interviews will be conducted; etc. Then, she’ll coordinate scheduling and share pertinent information to the candidate so they can be on-time and ready to discuss your opportunity, whether that’s in person at your office, or via Microsoft Teams video interview. (We can even send out a Microsoft Teams meeting bridge for you and the candidate to connect on!)

During the interview, you’ll get a sense of your own as to whether the candidate meets the eligibility and suitability requirements of your role. Our Talent Advisor will check in after your interviews to hear about what went well, what concerns still linger, and what next steps look like. Our Talent Advisor will also get feedback from the candidate to ensure a strong mutual fit before moving ahead in the process. This two-way flow of information and feedback is one essential for effective recruiting services – and helps ensure that by the time an offer is issued, you’re confident it will be accepted.

Having a strong rapport with your Talent Advisor can help you move through the hiring process faster, more effectively, and with the outcomes you’re looking for. Sometimes hiring managers hesitate to share negative feedback about a candidate’s skills or experience (because who likes giving bad news?), but we encourage open communication during this process. Understanding exactly what is or isn’t working helps us ensure a better outcome on the next candidate. And if things are going well, timely communication is even more important: you’re more likely to get an enthusiastic “yes!” in response to an offer when the candidate feels the process has moved along at a natural clip, and they’ve received timely, positive feedback. Plus, a strong rapport with your Talent Advisor also allows her to share honest feedback from candidates about your position, interview process, and the candidate experience.

What details Talent Advisor Wants You to Know

Want the inside scoop about working with our Staffing Services professionals? We sat down recently with Kat Grunzinger, Managed Solution’s Talent Advisor, to talk about her professional background in recruiting and her hopes for Managed Solution’s Staffing Services.

Here’s what Kat Grunzinger, Managed Solution’s Talent Advisor, wants you to know!

Q: What do you want a hiring manager to know about you?

A: “I want hiring managers to know that I’ve been in their seat! I know how challenging it can be to find, vet, and hire the right people for the right positions.  That level of empathy drives me to move quickly across the process – jumping onto an intake call, running through recent conversations to see if there are any immediately ‘right’ candidates, proactively sourcing talent across multiple platforms, and being timely in scheduling and feedback. I will earn the hiring manager's trust by active listening to quickly understand an opening; by being flexible and available for their calls; by following through on any action items outlined; and by reassuring them that I’m here for them! I feel most successful when I know we’ve done the right thing for the client.”

Q: What drew you to recruiting and what’s your favorite part of the process?

A: “I love getting to meet talented individuals and hearing their stories and learning what they want out of their careers – and then getting to help make that happen! It’s a privilege to assist in their journeys, and I take seriously that we are talking about a person’s livelihood. The same care I take in building relationships of trust with hiring managers, I apply to our Talent Community. My goal is to facilitate transparent, two-way communication. I’m not afraid to tell a candidate when a job isn’t going to help them meet their goals because it frees them up to find the opportunities that are right.”

Q: What should a hiring manager know about your job to make the relationship more effective?

A: “Honest and open communication matters. Not only is this aligned with Managed Solution’s values and Code of Conduct, it’s truly critical for recruiting and other Staffing Services. A hiring manager needs to be honest and realistic about budgets, the true needs of their team, – and sometimes as an outside entity, I’m able to help them see another side of the coin. Whether that’s advising the client about the right pay scale for a position with a specific region or helping them see that their job description is unrealistic (or describes three different jobs), I really appreciate when hiring managers value this two-way feedback. I think it brings us more credibility as recruiters and ultimately helps clients fill their needs.

I think it’s also important for a hiring manager to understand that my role as a recruiter is to help sell the value of an organization or position to candidates. The time we invest up front in an intake call positions me to effectively communicate with potential candidates about the roles, and to proactively answer the questions they have. We’ll both spend more time talking to the right people if a hiring manager spends the time with me up front to help me learn how their team functions, what types of soft skills help someone thrive, and what perks/benefits exist within their organizations. I’ll definitely do the right homework on my side to read the job description, the company website, and more before that meeting, but there’s nothing like learning straight from the hiring manager how the team is doing and what it needs.”

Q: What are your hopes for Managed Solution’s Staffing Services?

A: “My hope is that we can continue building trust with our clients, as we succeed in connecting them with qualified talent. I know I’ve done my job when a client comes back for help with another opening or refers us to their colleague for assistance on a role. Continuing to help good people find fulfilling work with amazing organizations – that’s what it’s all about!”

Ready to hand over the heavy lifting to us? Email us about our Staffing Services today!

The Intersection of AI, People, and Society - Microsoft's Role

Computer scientists could only dream of the capabilities that an average consumer might now take for granted at the time that the field of AI (artificial intelligence) was founded more than 50 years ago.

For decades, areas such as computer vision, deep learning, speech, and natural language processing have challenged the field's top exerts, yet today, it seems that computer scientists are making more progress every day in these areas (among many others).

Because of these breakthroughs, tools including Microsoft Translator are coming to life, and it is only up until recently that things like this were the stuff of fantasy and science fiction. In turn, so many people are being helped in so many ways by, for example, breaking down language barriers and facilitating communication.

Just the beginning

Last September, Microsoft announced the creation of Microsoft AI and Research, a new group that brings together approximately 7,500 computer scientists, researchers and engineers from the company’s research labs and product groups such as Bing, Cortana and Azure Machine Learning.

Microsoft Research AI, a research and incubation hub within Microsoft's research organization, is focused on solving some of AI’s most difficult challenges. The team of scientists and engineers will work closely with colleagues across Microsoft’s research labs and product groups in order to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and accelerate the integration of the latest AI advances into products and services that benefit customers and society.

A core goal of Microsoft Research AI is to reunite AI research endeavors, such as machine learning, perception and natural language processing, that have evolved over time into separate fields of research. This integrated approach will allow the development of sophisticated understandings and tools that can help people do complex, multifaceted tasks.

Conclusion

Microsoft believes AI will be even more helpful when tools can be created that combine those functions and add some of the abilities that come naturally to people, like applying our knowledge of one task to another task or having a commonsense understanding of the world around us.

As AI moves from research to product, Microsoft is maintaining their commitment to foundational, open, and collaborative research in addition to their dedication to solving society’s toughest problems in partnership with all members of society. All the while, Microsoft is actively pursuing a mission in common with us here at Managed Solution, to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

Helping partners innovate in business applications

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As written by James Phillips on community.dynamics.com

At Microsoft Inspire this year, more than 17,000 partners, customers and business leaders will hear our CEO and leadership talk about the critical role our partners play in enabling customers to transform their businesses across industries. Microsoft invests billions annually in innovation to bring the best products to market to support our customers, and to give our partners a set of technology solutions and services they can build their business atop.

This ecosystem of Microsoft Cloud Partners is 64,000 strong – one of the largest in the world. As our partners look to develop or grow their cloud practice we offer them the most comprehensive cloud - spanning Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), application-platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) through leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. These services are enterprise ready and have been built from the ground up to work together.

ISV’s have always been able to build on Microsoft Azure. In fact, we have over 35,000 partners already using Azure IaaS and PaaS services for their apps. Increasingly we’re being asked by these partners to make our higher-level cloud services – particularly those that make up our business applications platform – available as embeddable building blocks.

We pioneered this with Power BI – which has been available as a partner-embeddable building block for nearly a year. Since then we’ve watched ISVs take advantage of Power BI Embedded to add powerful business analytics capabilities to their applications.

Now we want to give our partners even more capabilities with our award-winning business application services, such as:

Announcing ISV Cloud Embed

Today we are making it even easier for ISV partners to modernize their existing business applications, and build new ones, with a new program we are calling ISV Cloud Embed. Later this year, we will extend the number of higher-level services available as embeddable “building blocks” to include:

Benefits to ISV Partners

In addition to being able to embed and build atop these new capabilities, partners also receive critical go to market benefits, based on deal volume, to support their business:

ISV Cloud Embed – like all Microsoft partner programs – delivers increased benefits based on usage and deal transaction volume. Go to market support is provided at all tiers. For partners whose apps drive significant consumption, we offer co-selling support from one of the world’s largest enterprise salesforces. Today’s post from Ron Huddleston provides more detail on this aspect of the program.

Getting started

Any ISV that builds qualified, finished applications can participate in ISV Cloud Embed at different levels and benefits based on the partner’s preference. To learn more about the program, please go to the ISV Resource Hub. If you would like to sign-up, there’s a simple online form to get started.

We look forward to seeing you at Inspire this week where we will share more about this program, and we look forward to building with you in the coming months.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The intersection of sports and tech, help amid workforce upheaval and a new future podcast

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

As written by Susanna Ray on blogs.microsoft.com
This was a week for jocks and geeks to unite, as they convened at Hashtag Sports, an innovation conference in New York City exploring the convergence of media, sponsorship, content, advertising and culture.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Microsoft, an official partner of the event, hosted a media event where tech trailblazers from companies including Arccos Caddie showed how they’re elevating our favorite games. Sal Syed, CEO and co-founder of Arccos, demonstrated how cloud-based golf technology is helping weekend golfers get more birdies. FoxTales CEO Josh Hubberman highlighted his company’s custom baseball card technology and other conduits to foster new relationships between teams and fans. Staff from the Seattle Reign FC professional women’s soccer club talked about the team’s embrace of technology in an effort to boost performance and score more goals by more efficiently measuring and managing the cumulative toll of the games on players’ bodies. And NASCAR officials showed off a new race management app that helps them see individual cars better within the fluid motion of the field, in a sport where every second counts.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

This week’s focus on fun technology wasn’t limited to New York – L.A. got in on the action, too. AEG’s L.A. LIVE entertainment and sports district, which 20 million people pass through each year, got a new addition with the revamped Microsoft Lounge that uses tech to blend Hollywood’s past and present. Visitors not only are surrounded by the plush décor of old Hollywood speakeasies with antique furniture and brick walls, they’ll also experience artist installations that include a massive Kinect-powered wall of wooden tiles that moves based on guests’ motions, a photo booth with social sharing features and a mosaic mural of images continually compiled from the latest visits.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

The week wasn’t all fun and games, though – The Markle Foundation and Microsoft Philanthropies signed a significant partnership to connect workers with new opportunities in the digital economy. Microsoft said it will invest more than $25 million over three years to expand Markle’s successful Skillful initiative, first across Colorado and then to other states.
The move comes as technological advancements are putting the workforce through “an upheaval unlike anything we’ve seen since coal and steam propelled machines to the forefront of industry in the 19th Century,” Microsoft President Brad Smith and Markle President and CEO Zoë Baird wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “This is one of the single biggest philanthropic investments Microsoft Philanthropies has made, reflecting the importance of the work involved.”
Microsoft also awarded Affordable Access Initiative grants to 10 companies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the U.S., including Picosoft Nepal, which is working to bring low-cost internet to schools in the country’s heavily rural areas.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Amid that workplace upheaval, Microsoft is taking steps to help employees better manage their work-life balance. The company is now offering workers around the world up to four weeks of fully paid leave if they need to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition. And Lakshmi Sasidharan, a search account manager for Microsoft in Singapore, talks about a “no-barriers career” alongside an ideal professional landscape that allows her to celebrate her role as a mother.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

The week also brought the first podcast of .future, a new series about making the future happen, hosted by science and technology reporter Cristina Quinn in conjunction with Microsoft Story Labs and Gimlet Creative. The first episode explores what it takes to secure the information we store in the cloud and protect against personal and global attacks on the digital battlefield.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

In apps this week, making your own music has never been simpler with the software behind Music Maker Plus, which is celebrating its launch in the Windows Store with a 50 percent off sale. For a limited time, you can also buy any book in the new Books store for Windows 10 and get $5 off the next one – but hurry, because the offer expires at the end of Friday, June 30.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Whether you’re enjoying music, reading a good book, making the world a better place or using new tech to help you play or watch sports, we hope you have a terrific weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week!

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Edwards Lifesciences moves to Office 365 to keep innovation at the forefront of its culture

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

As written by Sal Chiovari on blogs.office.com

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

When I joined Edwards Lifesciences three years ago, I was attracted to an innovative medical technology company that clearly puts patients first. I also saw an opportunity to revamp the IT organization to partner more strategically with the business and deliver a modern, agile workplace that strengthens the collaborative culture at our company. We embraced the Microsoft Office 365 suite to drive mobility, agility and innovation at Edwards Lifesciences.
Collaboration is at the heart of the corporate ethos at Edwards, so much so that the user-friendly services within Office 365, such as Yammer, have already gone viral within the company. I’m thrilled to see employees using the enterprise social network to ask questions and create a dialogue across our global network. Today, Skype for Business Online is the primary tool for meetings and collaboration at Edwards. I love the whiteboard capability for large meetings and problem-solving discussions with colleagues around the globe. And we’re using Microsoft Surface Hub devices to augment our video calls with a great interactive whiteboarding experience. As we begin using Skype for Business PSTN conferencing with dial-in capabilities, it will provide a new level of effortless communication in an environment that meets the high demands for security in our industry.
We’re in a highly regulated industry, so security played a major role in our decision to go with Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Our strategy is simple: when you provide employees with a protected environment and user-friendly, leading-edge tools, they won’t feel compelled to pursue rogue IT. The rich set of productivity apps within Office 365 addresses all the collaboration scenarios that employees had tried to fill with third-party solutions. And we take advantage of rights management and data loss prevention capabilities within Office 365 to protect our information, so that collaboration happens in a highly secure environment.
We have an estimated 5,000 terabytes of data in our organization, so understanding where that data is and how it’s being used is a huge concern, especially when you want to enhance mobility. We’re using Enterprise Mobility + Security to support secure mobile access to our data via personal devices. In the past, Edwards employees were required to change their passwords every 60 days, creating confusion and inefficiency, but with Azure Active Directory Premium in Enterprise Mobility + Security providing multi-factor authentication, we are doing away with this cumbersome practice. In addition, if our employees forget their password, they can handle this on their own with Self-Service Password Management, which is quicker and more efficient, which also frees up our help desk for more important items. The wealth of security features in Enterprise Mobility + Security and Office 365 work together to create a highly secure, productive workplace where people can get their work done without distractions.
We’re also eliminating file shares within the organization. Thanks to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, employees will have a more secure, efficient alternative that saves time when it comes to searching for documents and files. And with Office 365 ProPlus, employees have the same great work experience with the latest version of Office on more than one device. It all comes back to ease of use; employees deserve secure, effective tools that facilitate collaboration and are as intuitive as the technology they have at home.
Historically, the IT organization at Edwards Lifesciences put a huge amount of effort into responding to requests and keeping the environment up and running; it left little time for anything else. Early on, I wondered if our reactionary approach was more of a help or a hindrance to innovation. I see a paradigm shift in IT at Edwards Lifesciences with the deployment of easy-to-use Office 365 services that usher in a new way of working for our employees, and free up time for IT to focus on more strategic initiatives and serve as stronger business partners. We’re using the Office 365 platform to take us to the next level of mobility, productivity and security, so this amazing company can continue to innovate, creating medical devices that improve the health of people everywhere.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Adobe unveils new Microsoft HoloLens and Amazon Alexa integrations

HoloLens and Alexa integrations - managed solution
Adobe unveils new Microsoft HoloLens and Amazon Alexa integrations

By Nat Levy as written on geekwire.com
Adobe is in the middle of its big Summit conference, where it is introducing a variety of new technologies, including tie-ins with the Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality headset and Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa.
Many of these new innovations are backed by the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning platform Adobe Sensei and the company’s catalog of cloud offerings.
Virtual reality is a big part of Adobe’s newest projects. In the advertising realm, the company envisioned a situation where someone could be standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City with a VR headset on. Based on the individual, various Adobe products such as Sensei and the Adobe Experience Cloud would come together to virtually replace the iconic billboards in the neighborhood with advertisements that might better speak to that person.
The HoloLens project visualizes data and layers it on top of the real world. For example, a retailer could use the technology to visualize sales data, so an employee wearing a HoloLens could see how various items are doing and decide to emphasize the more popular ones in the store. Additionally, retailers could place sensors on items, and see which products are generating the most foot traffic.
Here is a look at how Adobe and Microsoft are working together on virtual reality and retail:
Adobe wants to personalize Amazon’s digital brain Alexa. Alexa is open to third party developers, and Adobe wants to tie in its Experience Cloud to make it possible for consumers to ask Alexa for their reward status for a hotel chain or airline, for example.
Alexa would then use their customer profile data and preferences to recommend promotions or activities that take advantage of those rewards. Adobe said it would be able to do this in a way that protects people’s privacy.

Microsoft acquires Simplygon to accelerate innovation in enabling 3D for everyone

Microsoft acquires Simplygon to accelerate innovation in enabling 3D for everyone

By Kudo Tsunoda as written on blogs.microsoft.com
I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Simplygon, a premier developer of automatic 3D data-optimization solutions. This acquisition accelerates our 3D For Everyone vision and strategy, which we introduced with the Windows 10 Creators Update at our event this past October in New York.
Simplygon logoSimplygon’s technology and talent will strengthen our position in 3D creation, making it easier to capture, create and share in 3D. It builds on and extends our aspirations to empower a new wave of creativity with the Windows 10 Creators Update, Paint 3D and our online creator community at Remix3D.com.
Simplygon was developed by Donya Labs AB, a privately held company based in Sweden. Donya was founded in 2006 with the aim to be the premier developer of automatic 3D data-optimization solutions. Simplygon is a leader in 3D game optimization, dedicated to helping creators and users of 3D data across industries optimize content pipelines and streamline workflows.
The leadership team, led by CEO Matt Connors, founder and CTO Ulrik Lindahl and co-founder Koshi Hamedi, bring a depth of knowledge around 3D creation optimization, and we’re excited to welcome the team to Microsoft.
The Simplygon leadership team shares their thoughts on the news here.

From pit stop to checkered flag— NASCAR drives productivity through cloud-based IT innovation

From pit stop to checkered flag—
NASCAR drives productivity through cloud-based IT innovation

By Stephen Byrd as written on blogs.office.com

NASCAR-logo-2-413x67

In the midst of the deafening noise and speed of a NASCAR race, even mundane tasks like changing a tire become heroic. It’s the same with the technology we employ; simple tasks like collaborating on documents and sharing files support the essential teamwork that is at the core of the NASCAR enterprise. When the Technology Integration and Development team at NASCAR chose Microsoft Office 365, we knew we had found a platform that would simplify how we produce the exciting sporting events that are the NASCAR legacy. Today, we are about 25 percent migrated to Office 365, including SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
To say our business is mobile is an understatement; NASCAR holds 38 events a year all over the country. This means setting up the compound infrastructure, arranging catering and coordinating travel for our employees. For 10 months of the year, we are a traveling circus. It’s a huge undertaking, and it’s crucial that all the aspects of our operation run smoothly. In the past, the logistics of coordinating these events came down to printing out huge runbooks and relying on email to make sure everyone had the correct information before race day. That has fundamentally changed with the introduction of Office 365 and, specifically, SharePoint Online collaboration team sites. Using SharePoint Online, we created a brand-new intranet called Inside Track that employees use to collaborate simultaneously on documents, update spreadsheets in real-time and securely access the information they need on the road or from the track. Productivity is at a peak level in the company, and we’re setting up new races with maximum efficiency.
The company is also piloting Microsoft Teams to take chat-based teamwork to the next level. We have lofty expectations that Microsoft Teams can handle the extremely fast-paced collaboration that must happen trackside and in the pit. For example, we are interested to see if we can use Microsoft Teams to ascertain if a penalty has been handed out, rather than hopping on a radio channel or the phone.
Our fast-paced industry is unique, but NASCAR’s security concerns are much like those of any large enterprise. After doing our due diligence, we felt confident that the Microsoft cloud-based products were among the best in their class when it came to cloud security. We are confident that with Office 365 and a custom app built in PowerApps, we can easily manage data access for all of our employees and hundreds of freelance contractors to ensure everyone gets the information they need to get their work done.
The Technology Integration and Development team at NASCAR was born out of a single question: How do we empower the business to get more done? We chose Office 365, with its mobile-first, cloud-first benefits, to give our employees the best tools for working at the office or at the track. Putting a race together requires the same coordinated teamwork you see in the pit, and with Office 365 and SharePoint Online, we’re driving productivity into a new era of time- and cost-savings. That’s great news for NASCAR
Read the full case study here.