Going all in with Microsoft: How Shropshire Council has saved space, money and resources with Lumia, Azure and InTune

On course for a £500,000 IT save by picking a direction and sticking with it

The way vendors talk, it should happen more often than it does, but it's actually extremely rare to find an organisation diving headlong into one provider's all-encompassing IT solution, and making it work simply and effectively.

Barry Wilkinson, ICT manager at Shropshire Council, seems happy with Computing's label of "Microsoft poster boy", and there's really no other phrase for it. In the past year, faced with a £500,000 cut in his IT budget, Wilkinson hasn't just scaled back operations, he seems to have improved them.

Throwing out BlackBerry in favour of Lumia devices, equipping employees with Surface Pro 3 devices over iPads, and throwing out on-premise storage in favour of keeping files on OneDrive and Azure (and even running apps on there), Wilkinson has built quite the Microsoft shop.

It's all geared towards a "zero accommodation" mode of work, which Wilkinson hopes will enable every single employee to work from any location they need, or want, to.

"I say to people go and work in a carpark somewhere, and report back," says Wilkinson.

"I just want people to work how they want, where they want, and the Windows platform itself allows that single level. It doesn't matter what device you're looking at. Word looks the same on a Lumia as it does on a Surface Pro, and it feels the same on a laptop. If you have more than one device, a Word document is the same. The Windows platform pulls it all together."

The shift to Microsoft devices began when the council's contract with Orange ended, and Wilkinson encountered what he calls a "resounding desire to move away from BlackBerry" from staff.

Wilkinson describes the old device landscape as a "BlackBerry Curve space" with an "email and calendar-only approach to technology", which meant even simple tasks like editing documents or engaging in conference calls were far from easy.

Development of applications was also an uphill struggle.

"In the skillset I employed, we couldn't drive any kind of BlackBerry development," he laments.

"It required BES [BlackBerry Enterprise Server] on every premise, and that needed licensing, so that was another cost of BlackBerrys. We were happy to get rid of that by moving to Windows Phone."

Microsoft's mobile data synchronisation suite ActiveSync was already in place at Shropshire, enabling the council to "move quickly" with making email work on Lumia, and bringing in Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) allowed IT to begin "managing devices properly", explains Wilkinson.

Sophos security was managing the BlackBerrys, but this had "started to let [Shropshire] down" anyway, with support not forthcoming and devices failing to enrol, so Wilkinson reached out to Microsoft and decided on mobile management suite InTune.

Managing devices through the cloud was something Wilkinson describes as "a new thing for everyone", with all 800 new Lumia devices soon migrated to it, and Surface Pro 3s, which are "slowly knocking off the iPads as they start to die", soon joining the fold, says Wilkinson.

Storage-wise, with Wilkinson faced with the need to take storage off-premise, he realised it was a case of "un-picking what we were already paying for". He describes OneDrive and SharePoint as "the ultimate sharing piece", moving storage and collaboration to these two solutions now letting him offer employees unlimited storage - as they don't overuse - as well as depending increasingly on Azure not just for storage, but for that coding and application driving quality that BlackBerry couldn't deliver.

"Azure is now being consumed as a service," Wilkinson states.

"The advantage is, I can host applications and web services, which sit beautifully there. And then the hub of the network doesn't become a mass of firewalls. But as we start to move, the hub of the network becomes a mass of firewalls and routing platforms, and all of a sudden we're driving traffic rather than hosting data, making sure everything goes to the right place. And that's so exciting."

And with plans to move the organisation to Windows 10 as soon as it's available - "it almost allows me to miss out Windows 8", says Wilkinson of the preview version's efficiency - Shropshire has firm plans to "take the workplace ahead of the home for the first time ever".

"Some of our suppliers are now saying we're moving quicker in Shropshire than some blue chips in London," Wilkinson says.