Homebuilding company promotes organization-wide video communications solution. Video. PulteGroup

Transcription

1 Homebuilding company promotes organization-wide video communications solution PulteGroup 5,000 employees United States Construction The homebuilding company PulteGroup needed an efficient way to use video to communicate with employees, train them, promote collaboration, and help sales reps in the field. To address this challenge, PulteGroup chose Microsoft Office 365 to extend its productivity-use cases alongside SharePoint Online. The company is able to easily manage corporate videos and empower employees by making it simple to share videos, lowering training costs.

2 PulteGroup is one of the largest homebuilding companies in the United States, with operations in 50 markets nationwide. Its brand portfolio includes Centex, Pulte Homes, Del Webb, and DiVosta Homes. Home-sale revenues for 2014 were $5.7 billion. Business Needs For more than 50 years, PulteGroup has been helping people fulfil their dreams of homeownership. It is the industry s sole multibrand homebuilding company and specializes in serving customers in all phases of the homeowner life. The capabilities of Office 365, alongside SharePoint Online, represent a tremendous productivity value. It s a great way to reach large audiences and targeted audiences alike. Jacob Skaggs, SharePoint Developer, PulteGroup Last year, PulteGroup wanted to better share information with its employees through video. This included communications from senior management, training, and virtual tours of homes, but the company ran into technical limitations with existing software. We were also having connectivity and time-lag issues, especially out in the field, explains Jacob Skaggs, SharePoint Developer at PulteGroup. Most company representatives have 4G connections, which have limited bandwidth. We needed a solution that would function efficiently outside of a direct connection to our corporate network.

3 Solution To address this challenge, PulteGroup evaluated several video solutions. While I was doing the research, Microsoft released an early version of Office 365, and it was integrated alongside SharePoint Online as an all-in-one cloud solution, says Skaggs. Office 365 is a more secure companywide destination where PulteGroup can upload, share, and discover smooth-streaming videos across employees devices. It also brings video to social communications through Microsoft Yammer and, when PulteGroup adopts it, Office Delve. Skaggs says, It s all about corporate communication. Employees can create videos, upload them, and manage them with no intervention from IT, which is why we won t be looking for competing solutions anytime soon. Skaggs notes that it s simple for the company s administrators to manage permissions, add or remove video channels, and spotlight key content. It s easy to delegate administration, he says. In particular, Skaggs appreciates how easy it is to create video channels to focus on a specific subject, department, or team. And he says that competing video solutions would have required significant IT resources to manage. Office 365 didn t need any of that. All we had to do was turn it on. Benefits By choosing Office 365 with SharePoint Online, PulteGroup has an easy-to-manage video platform for document collaboration and video communications that serves users across the devices they choose. One-to-all communications and collaboration Office 365 offers PulteGroup one-to-many (or one-to-all) communications the ability to distribute video widely within the organization so that an employee can reach as many colleagues as needed. Eddie Surabian, Director of Infrastructure and Operations at PulteGroup, adds, Our CEO has always wanted a way to deliver short video presentations on consumer experience, how the business is running, and important activities in the company. Office 365 and SharePoint are the perfect venue to deliver corporate messaging and news. Skaggs also sees Office 365 as a tool to promote collaboration. Users can pop out their cameras and take a quick video to communicate with their team. This will offer time savings and faster communications about a specific channel s subject. Homebuilding Operations also has a channel. We use Office 365 as a host for virtual tours of our homes. Field representatives are able to generate internal excitement over innovations we re bringing to the home market.

4 Easy to deploy, maintain, and use Skaggs and his colleagues appreciated the simplicity of the solution based on the enterprise-grade SharePoint platform. Office 365 is easy and straightforward, not only for our users, but also for our support staff. He adds that it is now easy to manage who can view videos and who can upload and easily spotlight new, important content. As an example, he says, We can almost effortlessly create a rich interactive experience. Just flip on a channel, and users have a built-in connection to Yammer, allowing them to interact with blog content. Specifically, the company is using an embed feature to insert videos inline in a blog. Tight interoperability with SharePoint Online is also key. Employees should not be aware that they re moving from SharePoint to another tool, says Skaggs. That s why integrating video services into Office 365 is so important. It s a seamless experience. No-hassle cross-platform support Another critical benefit of Office 365 is cross-platform compatibility. It supports playback in the browser across devices bringing encrypted video to multiple browsers and device platforms. We have a mixed environment here of PCs and Macs, and we need to view video on mobile devices ios, Android, and Windows phones, Skaggs says. Our construction managers and our field personnel work with SharePoint and Office through a tablet, including ipads, Surface Pro 3, and Dell Mini Pro devices. With Office 365, we don t have to worry about compatibility issues the videos just play. Office 365 also adapts the video quality based on the user s available bandwidth. Ideal training platform PulteGroup now has training channels to support its well-structured sales curriculum. Skaggs says, It s scenario based and lends itself well to video. Our sales representatives can access the videos at any time, at any point within a video, and watch a video multiple times. It s a living archive that is easy to navigate. He notes the company will be using Office 365 for self-paced IT training as well on proprietary internal applications developed for sales consultants, construction, procurement, finance, and other line-of-business purposes.

5 Product Solution Taxonomies Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft OneNote Microsoft Office 365 Kim Cole, Training Specialist at PulteGroup, adds, I look forward to a broad implementation watch a video, have it become a social experience, like it, follow it, comment and make posts about it. I think that s valuable, especially for sales consultants. Once a video is in the system, it s easy for people to share it through and Yammer, to view it on their own devices, and make it available wherever users are, sometimes beyond a network portal. We used to host these videos in an Adobe Captivate environment, but we re migrating them to Office 365 to simplify IT management, adds Cole. The company also has instructor-led training. We record the lessons and post them to Office 365 so that everyone can easily access them anywhere. Skaggs adds, This is where we see the biggest savings the ability to reduce live and instructor-led training but still give employees the instruction they need. Skaggs summarizes the company s experience with Office 365 so far: The capabilities of Office 365, alongside SharePoint Online, represent a tremendous productivity value: it s not intrusive, and it s reliable. It s a great way to reach large audiences and targeted audiences alike. SharePoint SharePoint takes the work out of working together by providing a platform to manage, discover, and collaborate on the content that matters most to your business. This can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises, or through hybrid solutions, all with IT tools to manage security and compliance. Office 365 Office 365 allows you to easily upload, share, and play back video messages throughout your company. It s a great way to share executive communication, training, or recordings of classes, meetings, and presentations. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published January 2016