Ready to work the same day: Onboarding externals at Instone Real Estate with Windows 365 Cloud PC

The challenge: Providing physical hardware eats up resources

Active throughout Germany, the Instone Group develops sustainable living concepts and urban neighborhoods, constructs apartment buildings, and renovates historic structures. Highly intricate and requiring a vast amount of coordination, this mammoth task calls for support from local site managers and realtors. “The way we’ve structured our sales organization means we’re mainly using external employees, who are naturally used to working within the context of their own company and have their own in-house IT,” explains Frank Thyen, Head of IT at the Instone Group.

To provide access to essential applications, Instone’s IT team used to set each of these externals up with their own laptop. But this approach actually had several drawbacks for both sides: The externals then had two or sometimes more laptops to carry around and configure. What’s more, preparing new PCs required a great deal of time and logistical effort. Procuring, preparing, and distributing the hardware could take up to two weeks—time in which externals couldn’t start their work—and tied up a disproportionate amount of Instone’s internal IT resources.

In 2022, Instone furnished its 475 internal employees with new Surface devices and began to explore simpler and faster ways of integrating externals going forward. “Was it really the case that everyone needed us to set up devices of their own for them? Our answer was a resounding no,” Thyen says. Instead, Instone decided to provide externals with a virtual workspace with Windows 365.

The solution: Windows 365 Cloud PC optimizes the onboarding process

Windows 365 Cloud PC makes it possible to transfer apps, data, content, and settings from the Microsoft Cloud to any device. All that is required is a personalized login. The setup is quick, easy, and scalable to requirements.

These possibilities are what sold it for the Instone Group. “In the past, it took an enormous amount of effort to orchestrate the onboarding process in terms of who needed to be involved, what we had to requisition, where we had to send things, and so on,” Thyen says. “But thanks to Windows 365, we can either eliminate these steps or perform them much more efficiently. Now we can onboard external employees by the end of the day, including device setup. In the past, this would’ve taken two weeks.” In addition to freeing up capacity in the IT team, this also saves money: rolling out Windows 365 saved Instone from having to purchase around 50 new laptops. This naturally also helps the company enhance its ESG rating.

To develop and implement the new solution, Instone worked closely with glueckkanja, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network. With a wealth of expertise in Microsoft security technology, glueckkanja advises Instone primarily in terms of workspaces. “Windows 365 Cloud PC is precisely the solution Instone needed to bring even more efficiency to its IT provision,” says Nadine Rose, Lead Program Manager at glueckkanja. “In addition to speed, Windows 365 offers an impressive degree of scalability for responding quickly to growth.” glueckkanja was involved in the rollout of Windows 365 right from the start: the project began with a successful test phase in which a handful of employees used and evaluated the product. “It takes just one click to provide someone with a fully functional workspace,” says Leon Gottschalk, Cloud Architect at glueckkanja. “A product that proves helpful here is RealmJoin.” Developed by glueckkanja, RealmJoin is a companion to Intune and offers a quick and easy way of setting up virtual workspaces using drag and drop. It takes just a few minutes to configure the required computing power, storage space, and programs. “Our RealmJoin solution is the ideal companion to Intune and absolutely the right vehicle to quickly and very easily configure Windows 365 workspaces that meet Instone’s requirements,” Gottschalk adds.

Moreover, the new solution gives Instone the option of creating custom workspaces for internal staff as well. “Many complex calculations call for a great deal of computing power,” Thyen explains. “The standard program available in the on-premises environment simply didn’t have this capacity. That’s why we now make Windows 365 available to those colleagues who have these requirements.” The Cloud PC delivers the scalable computing capacity needed to process large files. This high level of personalization ensures that Instone will use Windows 365 Cloud PC even more in the future to establish increasingly efficient workflows.