At Microsoft we see software as an important part of addressing environmental challenges and enabling society to have a better understanding about the natural resource and systems which we depend on. Sometimes those challenges can be as simple as providing people with face-to-face communication without needing to travel.
That’s the challenge that faced one Microsoft customer, Argyll and Bute Council in Scotland. They needed to improve communication and increase productivity—not an easy thing to do since the council is responsible for 26 inhabited islands and 3,000 miles of coastline. This very dispersed workforce also consisted of 4,000 employees operating from 60 principal sites.
To address these challenges the council implemented a flexible work program. This new program included moving away from their existing VoIP solution and transitioning to Microsoft Lync 2010. Their existing VoIP solution never effectively integrated into the rest of their Microsoft software and was not as cost effective as Lync 2010.
Lync features, which can tell you whether someone is online and where they are logging in from, made it easier to find the right person to take a voice call. At the same time, videoconferencing reduced the need to travel across the country for meetings in many cases. These improvements have helped the council reduce travel, increase effective communication, and reduce pressures on already tight budgets.
You can learn more about the Argyll and Bute Council Flexible Working Program by reading the full case study.