If you’ve been in the workforce for a few decades, you probably remember the office memo.  It was the mechanism many enterprises used to communicate with employees before email and the Internet. It had to be typed, copied, and manually distributed to every employee via a physical mailbox. Once received, employees often stacked these memos in large piles on a corner of their desk, or even worse, threw them in the trash without reading them.

We’ve come a long way - it’s true. Yet despite messaging software such as Microsoft Exchange, and collaboration software such as Microsoft SharePoint, many large companies still have a difficult time communicating company initiatives and strategy to all of their employees.  Some enterprises have large numbers of employees who work on the retail or factory floor. Others have large sales staffs that spend most of their time on the road. In many cases, it’s simply been too expensive to equip all of these “deskless workers” with the hardware and software needed to connect them with the rest of the company.

Yet that is changing thanks to the flexible approach to cloud computing offered by Microsoft. Unlike other cloud vendors that require an all-or-nothing approach to the cloud, Microsoft enables organizations to continue to leverage their on-premises investments while bringing additional employees into the communication fold via the cloud. Companies can continue to serve their existing employees at no extra cost. And they can inexpensively add new groups of employees to the network with subscriptions to Microsoft Office 365.

Take Coca-Cola Enterprises, for example. The world’s largest marketer, producer, and distributor of Coca-Cola products, the company employs about 72,000 people, and operates 431 facilities, 55,000 vehicles, and 2.5 million coolers, vending machines, and beverage dispensers. The company wanted a more effective way of communicating within the corporation. Yet its email system had been unable to reach certain segments of employees. Workers in manufacturing facilities had limited access to the corporate network. Mobile customer-facing employees who were making sales and positioning Coca-Cola products in store environments also lacked convenient access to company email and content.

Coca-Cola Enterprises wanted to extend its existing IT investment, and enlisted Microsoft to combine its on-premises software with integrated software services in the cloud. The result is a robust SharePoint portal to support worldwide collaboration and communication of corporate strategy that was made available to 42,000 deskless workers with Microsoft cloud technology. 

Kevin Flowers, Director of Enabling Technologies for Coca-Cola Enteprises, calls the IT partner project “one of the best” Coca-Cola Enterprises has experienced. “This project has exceeded our expectations from an IT standpoint, showing how well an organization can lay a foundation and transform the way people communicate in a large company,” he says.

To learn more, please check out the Coca-Cola Enterprises case study. Also, please share your comments. Has cloud computing transformed the way your company communicates? We would like to hear your story.