Improving education programs with an Office 365 intranet

Project Details

Customer

IUBH International University of Applied Science, Career Partner

Product

Debble Workplace

Partner

ETTU

How do you connect employees from 5 different business units?

Career Partner, headquarters of the IUBH International University of Applied Science, uses Office 365 and Debble intranet to connect employees and knowledge in one platform. Tobias Raudschus, Project Manager at Career Partner, and Jasmin Handwerker, leader of the Distance Learning Project Management team tell you about their project, experiences, objectives, goals and learnings.

The biggest challenge was to connect all employees. In addition, collaboration and improving internal communications were important topics. All of this needs were combined in one project which resulted in the specific need for an intranet. As part of Microsoft’s education program IUBH owned Office 365 licenses which therefore was the foundation of the new intranet.

The challenge

5 different business units

Tobias: “We have 5 different business units. This makes it difficult to share knowledge and information. To realize this we have made the following objectives:

In short, the key objectives were:

Reduce mistakes and improve quality
Improve collaboration between departments
One central place for internal communications

Requirements

Partner and selecting a suitable product

Jasmin: “Because we don’t have any experience with Office 365 we were looking for a supplier that would be able to really advise us.” Tobias adds: “technology is changing so fast nowadays. Therefore we wanted to use Software as a Service. Now it’s always up to date.”

Jasmin is happy with the collaboration during the project. “With the Debble intranet software and ETTU as a partner we were able to set things up effectively with a minimal lead time and impact on our own resources.”

“The Debble platform is very flexible. Therefore we were able to set things up fast and effectively, following our own organization structure. Users can get started right away because it’s super user friendly. In addition, SaaS fits right in to our IT strategy”, so says Tobias.

For their IT department it was very important the new intranet wouldn’t bring an extra workload. “Our priority are our students and the quality of our education program. We want to focus on that.”

A few of the key requirements:

Being able to collaborate as partners
- No SharePoint or Office 365 knowledge required
Being able to extend the intranet in a later phase

Approach

The road to a successful intranet

To achieve success IUBH, ETTU and Debble collaborated closely. The team consists of an overall project manager, stakeholders, consultants, the CEO, CTO and CMO. Employees are involved from the entire organization. Training was also a vital part on the way to successful intranet. “After our training we started training our employees. They were excited and couldn’t wait to start working with the intranet. That was a very promising and positive reaction which confirmed we made the right choice”, so Jasmin says.

Learning

Think about your target groups

At the moment the first business unit of the university is live with the intranet. After this unit other units of the university are going live in the following months. From this first step Jasmin recognized the fact rights management is very important. Not only for university’s and schools who work with both students and teachers but also for companies. “It is important to have a clear definition of the groups that should be in the intranet. Do it beforehand and think about the groups, what they should be, what they need and what they can and cannot do. If you do it afterwards it will cost you extra time and It will delay your project.

The future

Our Office 365 productivity platform

The project approach of IUBH is by launching the entire new Office 365 intranet platform step by step. After all employees are familiar with all the new intranet possibilities the university is going to launch other Office 365 productivity tools. In the nearby future they also wish to implement smart approval workflows as well to handle holiday requests and billing information.

About

IUBH International University of Applied Sciences

IUBH is a university located on 16 locations in Germany, Austria and Ireland. It was founded in 1998 and combines in five different study models practical relevance, international orientation and maximum flexibility under a single roof. The university is a leading international university in Germany in private universities of applied sciences. IUBH is provided by Career Partner GmBH situated in Munich. With 800 the Career Partner team prepares more than 14.000 students for international careers.

“With a native and flexible platform such as the Debble solution we have a rocket start with the launch of our new intranet and we can continue improving our internal communication and collaboration by utilizing all the Office 365 features step by step.”

Tobias Raudschus, Project Manager at Career Partner

Show all cases