Orange unleashes positive productivity with Microsoft 365

Optimizing and securing the Microsoft ecosystem is a major driver of productivity, as demonstrated by Orange Business and Orange Cyberdefense during a presentation at Hello! World in Rome in June. Our experts assist clients in maximizing their investments and preparing them for the upcoming artificial intelligence revolution with the imminent widespread adoption of Copilot, generative artificial intelligence, integrated into Microsoft 365.

Eighty percent of businesses and organizations worldwide use Microsoft Teams to some extent, according to experts from Orange Business and Orange Cyberdefense during a breakout session at Hello! World. This key ecosystem provides a solid, comprehensive foundation for digital transformation. Yet, its users are still not exploiting its potential. As a longstanding and privileged partner of Microsoft, Orange Business, a network operator and a leading digital solutions integrator, supports its clients in optimizing their activities and maximizing their investment in Microsoft 365 by leveraging all its capabilities, both in production and security. With a vision: to unlock “positive productivity.”

This positive productivity revolves around five quite complex challenges that many industries are facing: creating a user-centric digital workplace, delivering an outstanding employee experience, enabling a high-performing, flexible and scalable hybrid work environment, managing terminals, OS and application fleets in a modern, efficient way, and fostering a responsible enterprise that aligns with environmental, social and governance goals.

Matching the strategy

Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool in tackling these challenges. Orange Business helps CIOs, CISOs and other business owners to get the most out of their investments. From developing a roadmap to implementing automation and artificial intelligence processes, Orange Business experts provide support at all levels to amplify the potential of Teams and the Microsoft 365 environment, aligning them with their clients' objectives and integrating them with their legacy solutions, always through the lens of positive productivity, focusing on the employee experience throughout the deployment cycle of digital transformation solutions.

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Orange Business knows how to harness productivity gains in each major phase of a project. It starts with auditing the current employee experience in the context of migrating to Teams. It goes through assisting users in genuinely adopting the chosen solutions by managing resistance, a crucial success factor. Orange Business also supports its clients in deploying, integrating their legacy equipment and managing Microsoft Teams Rooms, allowing employees to fully participate in meetings, whether in the office, at home or on the go.

Orange Business takes over the complexity

In all cases, “the complexity of the challenges does not disappear,” emphasized Vivien Boistuaud, Head of Employee Experience Business Development for Europe at Orange Business. “Orange Business takes over to simplify our clients' lives.” For example, in countries like India, China or Brazil, where the regulatory environment does not allow for one single voice provider, Orange Business manages various local telecommunications operators on behalf of its clients through multi-service integration (MSI), streamlining processes and unlocking their productivity.

A client case study gives another interesting illustration. A food processing company understood that there is a tight relationship between Net Promoter Score (NPS) and sales. The key business outcome it was looking for was harnessing productivity to better serve its customers. Orange Business took over the complexity and deployed a unified collaboration solution for all entities within this global group to streamline collaboration. They implemented Nice CXOne as a solution for the call center, integrating it with Teams. In the end, agents could directly reach product managers and knowledge workers throughout the company and respond faster and better to customer problems.

Automation comes with challenges

Orange Business also provides support once the solutions are deployed and employees start adopting them. One of the major challenges, which will intensify with the widespread use of artificial intelligence, is to support and harness innovation within the organization, particularly through the adoption of Microsoft's Power Platform. This platform allows users to have a low-code, and probably no-code tomorrow, type of approach to automate their own work. It is a huge opportunity for business units. However, it is also a potentially major threat for IT to handle. How people are using the solutions has a significant impact on the way IT departments must design their resources. Orange has developed a framework for this “citizen development” that helps IT departments define a roadmap to guide this new application-development approach, ensuring its sustainability and compliance with company rules, while preserving flexibility.

It is obvious: when used properly, Microsoft 365 provides a complete ecosystem that can exponentially boost productivity at all levels. It also offers its users comprehensive security solutions, such as Defender or the SIEM Sentinel, to protect their environments, from endpoints to the cloud, against all types of threats and to ensure prevention and coordinated responses to attacks. Here again, Orange Business has the expertise, experience and resources—a scarce commodity these days, in the continuing cybersecurity skills shortage—to tackle the complexity on behalf of its clients and align their security investments with their ambitions, while taking into account their existing solutions.

Orange Cyberdefense: one of the top two Microsoft partners

Covering all cybersecurity needs, Orange Cyberdefense is proud to count over 140 Microsoft-certified experts among its thousands of professionals. As a Member of the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association (MISA), it is also one of the few 30 players in the world to have its Managed XDR solution certified by Microsoft. “In the past six months, Orange Cyberdefense even became one of the top two partners of Microsoft in terms of cybersecurity,” said Laurent Termeau, Global Partner Director at Microsoft.

As a specialist with extensive experience, Orange Cyberdefense has over 2,700 security experts worldwide, enabling its clients to capitalize on their extensive knowledge of Defender, just as Orange Business does for Teams. Orange experts can audit and configure the Defender tenants and enhance security posture thanks to the Defender Secure Score, a security score that Defender is providing, detect threats and manage incidents 24/7, 365 days a year. In addition, Orange Cyberdefense brings its Threat Intelligence to customers. “Our detection is constantly being refined thanks to the data on cyber threats and solid telemetry collected by Orange Cyberdefense through its global services, for detection and incident response of course, but also for protection,” explained Julien Ménissez, Senior Product Manager for Orange Cyberdefense, adding value to Microsoft security solutions by boosting their detection.

The premise of Microsoft Copilot

Taking innovation a step further, Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Security Copilot, linked to its investment in the artificial intelligence research laboratory Open AI. These automation and artificial intelligence features are currently being tested with a selected group of clients. They will eventually blend into each and every Microsoft environment to be a personal or organizational helper. Copilot is designed to help improve productivity with ease.

It can already “generate a meeting summary for those who missed it,” explained Laurent Termeau, or “create a concise PowerPoint presentation based on a long document.” In the future, it could assist employees with their automation needs by generating an application simply described in natural language. This imminent revolution will for sure bring more and more positive productivity. Orange Business is already helping its clients project themselves into this next big step by helping them maximize their adoption of the Microsoft ecosystem starting today.

marie-helene-briens-ware
Marie-Hélène Briens Ware

As VP, Employee Experience Portfolio, Marie-Hélène’s role is to organize and evolve the wide portfolio of solutions for the transformation of the digital workspace of Orange Business customers. There is a deep transformation going on with how we work, where we work and why we work, which requires the right digital solutions. Marie-Hélène has been with Orange for 20 years. In recent positions she has been in B2B: she spent a few years as pre-sales manager, sales manager on the French Enterprise market, B2B strategy and operations across the Orange footprint, and head of Customer Experience for Orange Business. She lives a lovely life in London, where she enjoys bird watching, old movies and playing squash in her rather scarce spare time – and she can’t wait to share all this with her young daughter.