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October 12, 2022

L’Oréal rapidly deploys Windows 11 Enterprise, enhancing productivity and security

For more than 100 years, L’Oréal has focused on providing the best beauty products on the planet for quality, efficacy, and safety. Delivering on that mission has made L’Oréal the largest cosmetics brand in the world, with an annual revenue of €29.8 billion. Maintaining that success requires constant investment in beauty tech such as AI-powered skin diagnostic tools and 3D-printed packaging. “We’re always striving to change the future of beauty, which means going beyond products to improve experiences and services for our customers,” says Guillaume Pires, Global Modern Workplace Director at L’Oréal. “With Windows 11 Enterprise, we can deliver a more secure environment to protect our innovations and support our employees with innovative experiences so they can do their best work.” 

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L’Oréal is committed to delivering a secure and consistent IT experience based on the latest available technology for employees located around the world. To establish a firm foundation for this commitment, it deployed Windows 11 Enterprise across the entire company in just four months. Windows 11 Enterprise, along with Microsoft Intune, now forms the basis of a rapid, repeatable update process that makes it possible to support the flexible and hybrid work required at L’Oréal while still maintaining high levels of security. “At L’Oréal, selecting Windows 11 Enterprise was a no-brainer. We’ve made it the foundation of everything we deliver, using it to create seamless connectivity between applications our users depend on every day, such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Apps, OneDrive, and, of course, Edge,” says Gustavo Peuriot, Global Endpoint Manager at L’Oréal.

“With Windows 11 Enterprise, we can deliver a more secure environment to protect our innovations and support our employees with innovative experiences so they can do their best work.”

Guillaume Pires, Global Modern Workplace Director, L’Oréal

Preparing for a successful deployment

With a complex, decentralized IT environment and disruptions caused by COVID-19, L’Oréal faced many challenges during its last two Windows deployments. Given those experiences, L’Oréal shifted to a continuous deployment approach. Rather than undertaking a large project for updates, the company has made updates an ongoing activity designed to keep its software current. “A few years ago, our complex environment made it difficult to stay up to date,” says Peuriot. “We redesigned our processes so that we can rapidly deploy the latest version of Windows and applications to deliver the best, most secure experience for employees.” 

In the past, L’Oréal largely relied on Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager for endpoint management and managed computers at the local level. This decentralized environment led to more than 500 hardware configurations with more than 6,000 Active Directory Group Policy Objects to manage them. To simplify its environment, L’Oréal created global hardware standards that were compliant with Windows 11 Enterprise and reduced its hardware configurations to about 70, which it manages with just 10 global policies. 

As part of the company’s move to the cloud, its IT team now manages all new hardware using Intune. “We really need to move to all the cloud services that Microsoft can offer us. We see that there we have the future for L’Oréal,” says Peuriot. “Being fully on the cloud will allow us a lot of use cases and business scenarios that we cannot deliver today.” 

As L’Oréal tested existing hardware, the IT team worked with the company’s hardware vendor to ensure that the latest drivers were registered in Intune and pushed out as regular updates. This provided more reliable connections for employees as they embrace hybrid work and connect to various peripheral devices, such as external monitors and docking stations, as they move between environments. The company also included local IT teams in the hardware testing. “We didn’t always have access to all the hardware, so we involved the local teams, and they gained a lot of comfort with Windows 11 Enterprise by doing the testing,” says Peuriot. 

Testing L’Oréal’s 2,800 applications across its factories, stores, and departments, including R&D, followed a similar approach. The team used Intune to create an application inventory and assess their application testing needs. About 85 percent of applications were deemed compatible without requiring testing. The team then identified application owners and pushed out testing for those applications to local subsidiaries where they were being used. “The upgrade readiness and compatibility reports in Intune showed we had more than 90 percent application readiness and 100 percent driver compatibility, which demonstrated to our leadership and our local subsidiaries that we were ready to do this deployment,” says Peuriot. “Those reports gave us a lot of confidence to move forward quickly.”

“At L’Oréal, selecting Windows 11 Enterprise was a no-brainer. We’ve made it the foundation of everything we deliver, using it to create seamless connectivity between applications our users depend on every day.”

Gustavo Peuriot, Global Endpoint Manager, L’Oréal

Creating an elegant approach to deployment

When it came time to deploy Windows 11 Enterprise, L’Oréal used a ring approach to support the continuous deployment model. Each ring is a community of users with its own communications and feedback channels in Microsoft Teams. The initial ring is mostly IT users, who handle the initial deployment testing. The second ring is critical application owners, who ensure that applications work properly, and the third is noncritical application owners. The rest of the company makes up the final ring.

When someone reports an issue within a ring, the deployment team uses Intune to identify devices that would be affected. Meanwhile, deployment can proceed to the next ring while the team addresses the issue for those specific devices. “We industrialized our deployment process with global governance and involvement of our global application teams and our employee experience teams,” says Peuriot. “Thanks to the ring approach and Intune, we deployed Windows 11 Enterprise worldwide in record time. Our previous deployment took more than a year. With Windows 11 Enterprise, we finished in only four months.” 

L’Oréal uses Power BI to create dashboards to monitor deployment progress. The dashboards provide real-time visibility into the status of every device for each update that is underway. “We use a lot of different tools between upgrade readiness and compatibility reports in Intune and Power BI to provide a 360-degree view of the process,” says Peuriot.

Windows Autopilot will add another level of automation to deployment. With many employees working remotely, using Windows Autopilot will help IT onboard employees in any location. “We want to use Windows Autopilot to provide our employees with what we call the unboxing experience,” explains Pires. “We deliver the PC from the factory to the users at the office or at home. They unbox the device and sign in, and in less than 30 minutes, they can use their device.”

“Thanks to the ring approach and Intune, we deployed Windows 11 Enterprise worldwide in record time. Our previous deployment took more than a year. With Windows 11 Enterprise, we finished in only four months.”

Gustavo Peuriot, Global Endpoint Manager, L’Oréal

Enabling powerful change management

One indication of the success of the Windows 11 Enterprise rollout came from the L’Oréal IT support organization. Its staff had prepared for the deployment, expecting support calls to increase, but the opposite happened. L’Oréal saw a reduction in support cases as the deployment proceeded. 

The effort to standardize hardware and drivers contributed to the reduction in support calls, but L’Oréal also implemented a change management program to educate employees on the changes coming with Windows 11 Enterprise. “We created a communication campaign through emails and websites, which started way before the deployment itself, to inform people that they’d be getting Windows 11 Enterprise and describe how it would enhance their daily work life,” says Peuriot. The ring approach also helped because testers in the early rings doubled as employee experience champions who spread the positive message about Windows 11 Enterprise.

Unlocking efficiencies with Windows 11 Enterprise

The lack of support calls during the move indicated that L’Oréal employees were happy with the transition to Windows 11 Enterprise, and direct feedback confirmed it. Vinciane Guisse, HR Manager - Global Beauty Tech at L’Oréal, explains what Windows 11 Enterprise brings to her role. “I can move faster now,” she says. “I can use Task View to navigate quickly between windows and take advantage of the way the features are linked to Teams, like turning the microphone on and off from the taskbar.”

Similar feedback is coming in from across the business. “Our employees are not only using Windows 11 Enterprise, they’re embracing all the features that come with it,” says Peuriot. “The ability to multitask, use different desktops, and do quick searches has been a game-changer for our users, who especially appreciate how Windows 11 Enterprise integrates in a seamless way with our environment.”

L’Oréal also modernized its physical desktops to better support multitasking with multiple screens and enable employees to move easily between locations. “We’re providing a full set of features thanks to Windows 11 Enterprise, like the Snap feature, the new Start menu, new search features, and of course the seamless interoperability with Microsoft Edge,” explains Peuriot. “With the combined modern desktop equipment and latest hardware drivers, our employees now have the flexibility to work efficiently from anywhere.” 

The company also ensured that all devices now support Windows Hello for Business, which has become the standard authentication method at L’Oréal. This has further improved the employee experience and people’s productivity while also bolstering security.

The L’Oréal security team is impressed with the level of security that Windows 11 Enterprise delivers by default. “Thanks to all the security components supported by Windows 11 Enterprise, like TPM, UEFI, Secure Boot, multifactor authentication, BitLocker, and all the Group Policy administrative templates, we can give people a highly secure environment in which they can collaborate and work efficiently from nearly anywhere,” says Peuriot. 

With its new continuous deployment processes in place, L’Oréal looks forward to maintaining a high level of security and productivity by always having the latest and most secure version of Windows deployed. “At L’Oréal, we have one principle—security by design. So, if there’s a new update for a product or a solution, our mission is to deploy it at scale,” says Pires. “With our strategy to move to Intune to manage all our devices—whether PC, tablet, smartphone, or Microsoft HoloLens—we can help ensure that all our environments have the latest updates.”

“Thanks to all the security components supported by Windows 11 Enterprise … we can give people a highly secure environment in which they can collaborate and work efficiently from nearly anywhere.”

Gustavo Peuriot, Global Endpoint Manager, L’Oréal

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