Pennine Mencap is a registered charity, working to provide opportunities for adults with learning disabilities and complex needs in Oldham, Tameside and throughout Greater Manchester to create, achieve and express themselves.
They achieve this through a variety of services and activities that engage with learning disabled adults, and those with complex needs, helping them to develop skills that bring positive changes to their everyday lives, such as, skills to help them in the workplace and how to make effective life choices.
Key Outcomes
Security
Increased security and collaboration using cloud-enabled features implemented through Microsoft Office 365 migration.
Understanding
The onboarding process provided a detailed understanding of Pennine Mencap's activities, background, and needs.
Informative
We equipped Pennine Mencap with the information needed for successful implementation of features.
Collaboration
Pennine Mencap was able to take advantage of increased collaboration opportunities through secure channels.
What were the challenges?
Pennine Mencap were faced with cumbersome processes, limited collaboration and as a result a reduction in team productivity. This made it difficult to achieve their ultimate goal of securing effective and sustainable change in their community. This challenge had a direct impact on the efficiency and results produced by the internal team, as well as the speed at which their services were able to impact their community.
In addition to this, Pennine Mencap had a need to create a more secure IT infrastructure to prevent unauthorised access, manipulation of sensitive information from malicious actors and protect their network from cyberattacks.
What were the solutions?
Creative Networks implemented a Microsoft Office 365 environment, offering a number of software products that encouraged collaboration amongst the team. This included Microsoft Teams, an online workspace in Office 365 designed to help members stay connected and work together. It allowed Pennine Mencap’s users to easily chat, share files, and collaborate on projects within a secure environment. Additionally, OneDrive for Business was implemented allowing their users to store, sync, and share files.
Creative Networks further implemented a range of Microsoft Office 365 cloud-enabled security products to protect user data and systems from malware, ransomware, phishing, and other cyber threats. This suite of security features included Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which is an email filtering system that uses machine learning to detect malicious links and attachments; Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), which provides an extra layer of security by requiring users to provide two or more authentication factors when logging in; Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS), which provides visibility and control over all cloud apps used on the network; and Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP), which uses advanced analytics and threat intelligence to identify, investigate, and respond to sophisticated attacks.
This cloud-enabled environment increasing security and driving collaboration across Pennine Mencap’s team was achieved through a streamlined onboarding and implementation process carried out by Creative Networks. The onboarding process looked at the tasks to be undertaken by their team in order to supply products to Pennine Mencap and help them to understand and use these products. The team at Creative Networks looked to understand Pennine Mencap’s activities, background and needs, collecting the information.
Creative Networks technical Engineers carried out the required implementation tasks to make certain that the Microsoft Office 365 environment was functional. This included technical tasks, such as, configuring and modifying software, adding custom objects and fields, embedding the software into other applications, setting up users and conducting tests.
Ultimately, the collaboration features of Microsoft Office 365 allowed Pennine Mencap’s team to easily collaborate and communicate regardless of location, leading to a streamlined workflow and an increased capacity to work on multiple projects. The implementation of these features allowed Pennine Mencap to strengthen their communication and collaboration capabilities, increasing overall efficiency and productivity.
Additionally, the security features implemented by Creative Networks ensured the safety and integrity of Pennine Mencap’s data and reduced the risk of security breaches that would have been costly and damaging to their reputation.
The outcomes
Creative Networks has enabled Pennine Mencap’s organisation to increase both their security and collaboration across their team using cloud enabled security and collaboration features implemented through a Microsoft Office 365 migration. By providing a well-rounded onboarding process, which included a detailed understanding of Pennine Mencap’s activities, background and needs, Creative Network’s team were able to equip Pennine Mencap with the information they needed to ensure the successful implementation of these features. As a result, Pennine Mencap were able to take advantage of the increased collaboration opportunities available to them through secure channels. With this success, Pennine Mencap are now exploring full migration to a cloud environment in order to continue to improve their security protocols and collaboration capabilities and keep up with the latest technology trends.
Experts in IT solutions
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