About TfL
Transport for London (TfL) is the public transport authority for London. It manages the
day-to-day operations of the Capital’s underground, rail, trams, buses, river and street
networks, including 270 tube stations, 675 bus routes and thousands of CCTV cameras, 24
hours a day, seven days a week. TfL employs around 28,000 people, with around 18,000
users within TfL’s Digital Workplace.
Key Business Drivers
The TfL IT team supports all Digital Workplace users across the organization. Explains Paul
Riches, Product Manager, Digital Workplace Team at TfL: “As we migrated our on-premise
legacy SharePoint to Office 365, including 14,000 SharePoint sites and Microsoft 365
Groups to the cloud, we needed to improve site and content governance as well as the
user experience for site creation and management.”
Robin Thakur, Technical SharePoint Expert at TfL, continues: “Despite the massive benefits
of Microsoft 365, we quickly realized there was no way to effectively manage all the
Groups, sites and their subsequent lifecycle. With unmanaged IT sprawl on the increase,
this was incurring significant IT governance issues and presented challenges around the
application of a comprehensive security model across the organization.”
With over 18,000 users, TfL needed to regain control. Fast
Paul resumes: “Microsoft 365 comes with complexities and creates what I call
‘unintentional sites’ and Groups without the user knowing, which can lead to significant
IT sprawl. With 18,000 users, we needed a smart way to manage this, yet still offer self service, and adopt a solution that could really support us moving forward with our ongoing
Digital Workplace strategy.”
The ProvisionPoint Solution
After evaluating a range of different products, TfL selected ProvisionPoint Enterprise – a
powerful, cloud-based governance solution – as it aligned with their business needs and
represented good value for money to address their information governance, security and
data sprawl concerns.
ProvisionPoint Enterprise enables TfL to define customizable site templates with specific metadata features so they can collect important data that TfL need for managing security and information governance. By capturing key metadata and managing sites through their lifecycles with site leasing, ProvisionPoint Enterprise helps control the unmanaged site sprawl and, where relevant, apply approval workflows to prevent users from creating sites inappropriately.
Robin continues: “The ability to create customizable site templates makes it easy to offer full user self-service and swiftly respond to requests, while controlling data sprawl. It’s a flexible, powerful and labor saving tool that has significantly reduced the pressure on our IT resources.”
Why ProvisionPoint?
“TfL is a vast and complex business, and it was quite unusual for us to consider a smaller cloud player,” explains Robin. “However, ProvisionPoint Enterprise does just the job we needed it to do and ticks all the boxes – negating the need to invest in a larger, more costly solution and an extensive suite of tools which are not a good fit for our current usage profile on Microsoft 365.”
Paul continues: “As a major public organization, we have to meet and adhere to strict regulations. Our key stakeholders, including the Information Governance Team, are all delighted with ProvisionPoint Enterprise. It’s ability to handle PPI data and TfL restricted data is a great security feature. The solution works smoothly, everything is in one place, and our users find it very straightforward to use.”
Today, with ProvisionPoint Enterprise, TfL creates around five to six new SharePoint sites per day where users can get access to a new SharePoint site immediately
"The ability to create customizable site templates makes it easy to offer full user self-service and swiftly respond to requests, while controlling data sprawl."
Future Plans
Based on the success of the roll out, TfL is now looking to integrate Microsoft Teams into ProvisionPoint Enterprise.
“ProvisionPoint has worked closely with us to understand our needs and has been flexible and responsive as we implemented this service,” concludes Paul. “ProvisionPoint Enterprise offers great capabilities, as well as value for money, and we are confident it will support us in improving site and content governance and management as well as improving the user experience in line with TfL’s Digital Workplace strategy.”
