Moneta placed its bet on cloud and manica was there first-hand
Change of owner structure in any institution brings along many complex negotiations, administrative tasks, or decisions regarding human resources. Some obligations often impact also the IT department, since the new company is usually no longer able to use the solutions designed for the original one. And this was exactly the issue Moneta Money Bank was trying to tackle. This bank descended from GE Money Bank and entered the Prague Stock Exchange in May last year. The solution found resulted in creation of a completely new IT infrastructure that included also transition to the Microsoft Office365 platform and use of cloud services.
Aim of this extensive project with the advisory company manica s.r.o. in charge was to completely substitute all older individual work and communication services connected with GE Money Bank being used by the bank’s employees all over the country. Therefore, manica created initial analyses which defined options for transition to Office 365 cloud services and recommended execution variants. It also wrote a study and analysis of migration of the current collaboration processes and tools used by the bank’s employees to the Microsoft SharePoint Online platform.
Even though Moneta considered purchasing non-cloud on premise licenses during the initial project phases, after a thorough analysis it decided to implement cloud Office365 in the end. “Today, it doesn’t make much sense purchasing classic solutions. The reason being that the cloud versions make it possible to use on premise installations, which for us, specifically, this is the case of the Office Pro product, because we are using it on all desktop devices,” explains Lukáš Záruba, Moneta Money Bank Enterprise Architect and Project Manager, while adding that they have the possibility to use an online version of the same product in the cloud.
The whole transition to Office365 in Moneta with cooperation of manica was executed quite quickly. It took less than 10 months to start running the elementary types of infrastructure services, such as e-mail services or access management, to implement the new office software MS Office 2016, and to transition to the new team collaboration environment on the SharePoint Online platform. “Considering the fact that this was a banking institution’s environment, where we had to solve a broad spectrum of security areas while being compliant with all legal and internal bank regulations, the process was really incredibly fast,” explains Tomáš Kutěj, manica CEO.
Work sharing and communication are the key in Moneta
At present, Moneta employees may already work with Exchange online, which provides e-mail services within Office365. Usage of the Skype for Business application or SharePoint Online is new as well, the latter being platform for team collaboration and document and information sharing across the whole company. One by one, Moneta may add and use further services. The advantage is that the office package with applications such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, which is naturally included in this platform, enables the people to share their work, and at the same time, is not making them to change their working habits. “Our employees are familiar with previous versions of these products and the same tools are available to them at present, only this time in their newest versions and with a cloud solution. Which is much more comfortable for them than the other possibility, when we would have to transit to the competitor and they would have to learn working with a totally different user environment and functionalities, “ concludes Lukáš Záruba.
Radka Pekelská, HR Director in the Moneta company confirms his words. She is the one evaluating Office365 and its application from the user’s point of view. She frequently uses both SharePoint, as well as Outlook on the new platform. “For me, this change was all the more important due to the increase in capacity of our mailboxes. Before, I had only one gigabyte available, which resulted in need of continuous deletion of e-mails and making backups in other applications. New Outlook and Exchange Online brought fifty gigabytes of space for each employee, and that is very important for our work.” Even though she has been accustomed to working with an older version of Outlook for a long time, she adjusted to the new version very quickly. “If I need to solve something, thanks to Outlook, I can see immediately who is present in the office and who is online. That is very practical. Moreover, I enjoy having the option to set my own user environment. I like playing with the layout and colours. Arrangement per colours works very well for me,” she adds.
Transition to Office365 opened also other options for the employees regarding usage of the office package. For example, when a team is given a task to work i.e. on a report in Excel, the employee originally issuing the task can store it in the cloud and the others can access it online. And if they use its online version, they are able to work on the same document in real-time, with no need to be present in one room. Author of the document will share it with the other team members. That means that the whole team can edit is at once and that all can see every change immediately. “And since everything is connected in Office365, we can also simultaneously communicate via Skype for Business with no need to start this application separately. It’s because Skype chat is included in the platform and it interweaves through the different platforms,” specifies Petr Klička, Shared Services Centre Senior Manager in the Moneta company.
Moneta Money Bank also uses the SharePoint Online application on the Office365 platform, which replaced the intranet. SharePoint Online enables the employees to create their own internal websites where each department or division can present themselves and thus inform the others about what they are currently up to. Besides these department pages, SharePoint Online is also often used for creation of sites for individual projects and it can also function as an interactive helper. EduPortal is a perfect example, since it is used not only as a project site for the whole new cloud Infrastructure in process of creation, but also as a guideline instructing everyone how to work with all these novelties. Employees can find different information and tips, as well as practical guidelines on the EduPortal.
