IntraActive Governance gives Municipality of Sønderborg control of Microsoft Teams

23. March 2023

Sønderborg Municipality uses IntraActive Governance for managing a large scale implementation of Microsoft Teams

Sønderborg Municipality is Denmark’s 16th largest municipality with around 74,000 inhabitants. The municipality has 220 kilometers of picturesque coastline and covers the whole of Als as well as Gråsten and the surrounding areas.

For the past few years, select administrations have used Microsoft Teams as a central collaboration platform and it quickly became clear that the municipality had to implement some fixed frameworks.

“We needed some governance around Microsoft Teams. Especially when it comes to collaboration with external parties.” says Jesper Schmidt, Digitization consultant in Sønderborg Municipality. Therefore, the municipality implemented IntraActive Governance.

 

“IntraActive Governance gives us some automated guidelines that make it significantly easier to manage Teams. This makes it administratively easy for the users and we have control over which external users have access to which teams.” says Jesper Schmidt. He imagines that their Team’s platform would have looked completely different if they had not implemented IntraActive Governance.

"It would probably have been a bit more like the Wild West. Of course you can use Microsoft Teams without Governance, but we would probably have had many teams without owners and quite a few more tasks for the IT department to solve"
Jesper Schmidt
Digitization consultant in Sønderborg Municipality

Easy administration of Microsoft Teams

IntraActive Governance is a governance tool for Microsoft Teams, which gives Sønderborg Municipality the opportunity to manage the entire lifecycle of a team via naming conventions, templates, permissions and automated workflows. The administration module in particular gives the municipality a good overview.

“We can easily see how many teams we have, which are active, which are without owners, what external users have access to and much more. It provides structure and a fixed framework around our teams.” says Jesper Schmidt.

Large municipal IT rollout

In 2023, Sønderborg Municipality will roll out Microsoft 365 to all employees in the municipality. The hope is that Microsoft Teams in particular will be used by both administrative and front-line employees for collaboration, document sharing and online meetings. IntraActive Governance will not be an obstacle for the many thousands of new users, but will, on the contrary, make it easier for them to adopt Microsoft Teams.

"It would be somewhat more chaotic if we didn't have control. We don't interfere with what teams people create and who joins them. We just provide a framework that makes it easy to ensure security and cooperation. Controlling access to external parties in particular is much easier with a tool like this, so we have control over who has access to our data."
Katharina Stengaard
Project Coordinator in Sønderborg Municipality

User-friendly learning

Sønderborg Municipality knows that users do not adopt new tools automatically. Therefore, they are combining the large rollout with targeted training and frequent internal communication, which highlights the strengths of Microsoft Teams and the rest of Microsoft 365. For this purpose, the municipality uses a sister application to IntraActive Governance: IntraActive Learning. Learning is an online learning platform with clear and user-friendly courses in all the most popular Microsoft 365 applications.

“We have added IntraActive Learning to Microsoft Teams so that it is available to all users. When new users get a license, they get a link to the course portal. We also encourage users to go in and find a course for exactly the issue they may be facing, for example how to set up an online meeting in Teams.” says Katharina Stengaard.

One of the departments that has adopted Microsoft Teams is the Lean department. Previously, they used large pieces of paper and lots of post-its for the so-called brown paper method, which is part of the Lean practice. Now they use Visio in Microsoft Teams instead.

 

“They no longer have to fold that long piece of paper where half of your post-its have flown away before you even get to the car.” says Katharina Stengaard.

 

Sønderborg Municipality has around 400 teams and 1,000 users on Microsoft Teams. Before the end of the year, it will have grown to 5,000 more users and hundreds more teams, but these future prospects do not scare Jesper Schmidt and Katharina Stengaard.

"We chose IntraActive Governance precisely because it makes Microsoft Teams so administratively easy for both the users and our IT employees."
Jesper Schmidt
Digitization consultant in Sønderborg Municipality
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