Using Office 365 to support collaboration on HS2 at engineering joint venture Fusion

In 2016 the Fusion joint venture between three leading construction companies was awarded one of three enabling contracts for High Speed 2. To facilitate secure, collaborative working for all members of the project team, Fordway implemented a dedicated Office 365 domain and now provides ongoing user support to Fusion through its Service Desk. The cloud-based platform provides easy scalability as the project team grows while ensuring users always have the latest versions of applications and can work from any location.

When the joint venture was first established, email for everyone involved in the project was hosted by one of the three partners, Morgan Sindall. This quickly proved problematic as all three organisations needed to access the system. There was no joint infrastructure across the organisations, making collaboration difficult, and security of information was also an important requirement.

“We realised that working together would be much easier if we established a secure communication platform for the project which could be used by everyone working directly on the HS2 contract,” explained Damon Fox, Digital Integration Manager at Fusion.

Having decided on their solution, Fusion went to the market to find an experienced partner to carry out the implementation. After a obtaining a number of bids they chose Fordway to set up the Office 365 environment and to provide ongoing user support via their in-house Service Desk. This support has been well proven in an engineering environment, for example supporting Team BFK during 24-hour tunnelling on the Crossrail project.

“Fordway’s experience and the support they offered was a key factor in our decision to award them the contract,” Damon explained.

Ongoing support is provided by Fordway’s Service Desk, which users can call for any query, from a password problem to a more technical issue. This ensures that anyone working on the HS2 contract at Fusion can obtain IT support whenever they need it.

Using Office 365 to support collaboration on HS2 at engineering joint venture Fusion

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