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August 21, 2019

Global chemical company creates collaborative reaction with OneDrive

Ecolab is a global chemical company that prioritizes sustainability, making water conservation, renewable energy, and food safety its top missions. From its headquarters in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the company depends on employees all over the world to create a more sustainable, healthy world. It found a solution to its collaboration headaches with Microsoft OneDrive. Now, Ecolab teams collaborate more securely and seamlessly with OneDrive, wherever they are.

Ecolab

“We can use OneDrive for much more than personal file storage—it’s a collaboration platform that we use to work together on all files and folders. That’s the biggest benefit.”

Sam Qureshi, Director of User Experience Platforms, Ecolab

Chemical manufacturer Ecolab demands best-of-breed IT tools to support employees across the globe to further its mission. All over the world, companies use Ecolab solutions to work toward a more sustainable planet: clean water, safe food supplies, and abundant energy. Ecolab employees enjoy collaborating and achieving together. When it needed a more secure way to share files and better support collaboration and convenience, Ecolab migrated from a leading third-party solution to Microsoft OneDrive. 

Facing global collaboration and migration challenges

A variety of file types streams across the planet between Ecolab users. Split into four main business areas, staff work with customers across an enormous range of industries, from hospitality and healthcare to pulp and paper production companies to energy sectors. 

Ecolab teams share multiple file types—including graphics and photography—to create labels for chemical containers. And there are the usual Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents along with vector files and PDFs that power sales teams. “One of our biggest issues was sharing large files with teams in remote locations having very small internet egress points; it can take a lot of time to sync those files to their local devices,” explains Phil Stein, Director of Commercial Digital Solutions for the Food and Beverage Division at Ecolab. Not only does the global company navigate the usual complex web of permissions and other security provisions while teaming up with its customers and each other, it handles numerous file types and large video files. Ecolab also transmits videos of equipment for training or to help customers troubleshoot and repair equipment leveraging OneDrive as a robust solution for effective sharing and collaboration across the globe.

Blair Wade, Sales Operations Manager for Ecolab Light Industries in North America, has other file-sharing challenges. “We’re running sales meetings for nine regions, each of which has a sales folder with multiple presentations,” he says. “Imagine the confusion if all those people were emailing and editing multiple versions of the same presentation.” 

Many Ecolab users shared files with Dropbox for years. Ecolab switched to OneDrive to better tie into its Microsoft platform. “We wanted to simplify and lower license costs,” says Sam Qureshi, Director of User Experience Platforms at Ecolab. “But we also realized that it made sense for us to move to OneDrive because we’d have the capabilities we had with Dropbox and more, particularly integration with Outlook and other Microsoft Office 365 apps.”

Facing the expiry of its Dropbox contract late in 2018, Qureshi’s team launched a pilot project early in the year and completed migration by that August, two months ahead of schedule. Working carefully with concerns about impact to users, the team migrated more than 135 terabytes of data with no interruption to business services. His team cautiously researched every potential issue before deploying OneDrive. “We were very concerned about our internet egress points around the globe. We needed to be sure that we didn’t bring any business networks down due to re-syncing to a new cloud solution,” explains Stein. “Because OneDrive does delta syncs, we were not constantly running all of these files or syncing large files all the time via our internet points.”

For Steve Dorr, Independent IT Consultant at Ecolab and project manager for the deployment, uptake was fast, but not surprising in view of the OneDrive user-centric feature set. “In the six months since the migration, OneDrive consumption has grown tremendously, from about 135 terabytes of data to more than 400 terabytes and growing. People continue to find more ways to become more effective with it.”

“It was an amazing success,” says Qureshi. “Our core project team of 12 to 15 people plus extended teams that included network, operations, and support staff across the globe did an amazing job.” The project ultimately was nominated for an annual Ecolab CIO award. Qureshi also credits Dropbox for its help in preparing for migration. 

Plumbing the depths of feature-rich file sharing

Ecolab now relies on the interoperability threaded through the entire Office 365 platform to amplify productivity. “With Dropbox, we needed workarounds to tie our work in to the Office apps we use,” says Stein. “It was more of a standalone solution, whereas Microsoft has done a great job to make OneDrive and the other apps work together as seamlessly as possible, making our field associates more efficient.” 

“We can use OneDrive for much more than personal file storage—it’s a collaboration platform that we use to work together on all files and folders,” says Qureshi. “And now, with Microsoft Teams, we have an engine that brings all the content to you in one place. That’s the biggest benefit.”  

Wade relies on the version-history capability in OneDrive to keep his sales teams functioning effectively. “We all work from the latest version without confusion,” says Wade. “Having the history of all the previous versions helps if somebody accidentally erases all your data tables, for example; you simply revert without redoing all that work. That’s the beauty of OneDrive.” Jane Rivera, UX Automation, ServiceNow and Microsoft 365 Manager at Ecolab, knows how instrumental OneDrive is to collaboration at Ecolab. “We create a lot of decks for projects, so we value real-time collaboration,” she says. “No matter how we share files—email, Teams—people default to OneDrive where they can work together in real time; that’s where the collaboration happens.” 

And Rivera finds that deploying OneDrive eliminated confusion as to who “owns” which file. During deployment, her team resolved file ownership questions that had built up over years in a less structured environment. “With OneDrive, it’s easy to distinguish your personal folders from those shared by the team or by a colleague,” she says. Qureshi expands on that theme. “There isn’t a concept of individual versus team in Dropbox, which was confusing for end users,” he says, adding that because Microsoft Graph runs in the background, surfacing relevant content to the user, Ecolab workers spend less time searching for content. “OneDrive is more user-centric. One of the biggest benefits is the built-in intelligence that enhances the way users interact with content. It’s so well integrated into the Office 365 platform—the files just show up as they’re needed. Discover View intelligently suggests files trending around you, or your recent documents bubble to the top whether you are trying to attach a file in Outlook or work in the Office apps. It’s easy to get back to your pinned files in Office.com.”

Accessing files from anywhere

Ecolab staff find that the interoperability between OneDrive and Windows 10 affords them sophisticated capabilities that make life easier. Ecolab empowers its users with Files On–Demand, which they use to access all their files, choosing which files they want to sync for optimal storage management. Stein concurs. "In anticipation of going offline—if I am traveling on a flight and won’t have internet connection, for example—I use Files On–Demand to select the files I want to work on and make them available offline for easy access.”  

With customers spread across more than 170 countries, many Ecolab staff face challenging work environments, like hazardous customer sites or remote areas with limited connectivity. “People working in our Asia Pacific and Latin America regions may not have reliable connectivity and sufficient bandwidth,” says Stein. “And those in a restrictive environment, such as a customer facility surrounded by concrete or with a lot of chemicals, often can’t bring their devices. But with OneDrive, they can still access their files from onsite military standard devices supplied by the customer.”

Wade appreciates the dedication of his sales team, who worry about going on vacation without laptops. He pushes work-life balance but has found a compromise. The OneDrive mobile app gives sales teams easy mobile access to company resources. Stein validates that experience. “With the OneDrive mobile app, everything is at my fingertips, which is fantastic,” he says. “Once, laptops were our lifeline, but not anymore. Our documents are really anywhere and everywhere.” 

Reaching into the cloud for a winning hand

Until it moved to OneDrive, Ecolab used an enterprise backup solution. “We’d used a separate system for many of our executives and other people working with highly sensitive data,” says Qureshi. “But we no longer need to invest in an enterprise backup tool. With features like Known Folder Move, people can back up their standard Windows folders—Desktop, Documents, and Pictures—to OneDrive. No matter what happens to our hard drives and laptops, we can use functionality like Windows Autopilot, self-deployment, and Known Folder Move to easily provision a new device.” 

And thanks to the tight integration among Microsoft apps, the Ecolab team benefited from its previous work to organize and secure user data. “Our biggest priority—and our biggest challenge—has always been how to have a secure system for external sharing and collaboration,” says Qureshi. “We found that Dropbox by nature was more open. With OneDrive, we leverage our existing SharePoint Online governance to refine a structured process for more secure sharing with people outside the organization. Using the effective out-of-the-box controls, like data protection rules that limit the use of anonymous or shared public links, to help secure our environment was one of the biggest wins.”

User reception was one of the most rewarding aspects for the deployment team. “People don’t generally like change,” muses Stein. “But we keep hearing about how much people love OneDrive. It’s become an integral part of their lives. They have confidence that if their laptop was stolen tomorrow, their data would be safe.” Qureshi agrees. “Thanks to the OneDrive sync client, we also see a huge spike in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams usage,” he adds. “Now, people sync their shared libraries and access them on the go. We use OneDrive not only to enhance collaboration, but also to use other platforms to their best potential.” 

Find out more about Ecolab on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

“People don’t generally like change. But we keep hearing about how much people love OneDrive. It’s become an integral part of their lives. They have confidence that if their laptop was stolen tomorrow, their data would be safe.”

Phil Stein, Director of Commercial Digital Solutions, Food and Beverage Division, Ecolab

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