Customer story: Hoens & Souren lawyers to the cloud

Hoens & Souren lawyers could use a breath of fresh air in their IT-landscape. After all, should you be satisfied with an IT-environment that on one hand offers functionalities that you don’t use and on the other hand leaves no room for the further development and innovations you need to grow as an organisation? And is the use of your own application servers actually still of this time? “We were looking for something new,” says Pierre van Voorst, lawyer and partner at Hoens & Souren. “How can we make the digital workspace and applications we depend on more usable, secure and future-proof?” Time for yellow arrow to make a judgement.

With the digital workspace, we are no longer dependent on a specific service provider.

An application with a will of its own

“Our goal was to use cloud applications as much as possible in the form of Software as a Service,” Pierre continues. “For 99% of our applications, this turned out not to be a challenge for the yellow arrow team. That one percent was NextMatters. For us, this is a core application for document management, customer management and time registration in one application. Although it does what it’s supposed to do, it’s a traditional application that is not easy to use remotely. According to our partner at the time, there was nothing we could do about this. However, yellow arrow turned out to think very differently about this and applied this traditional application in a flexible and robust way in our new modern workspace“.

Everything in one digital workspace

Workspace 365 had to change everything. Pierre explains: “With the new digital workspace based on Workspace 365, we are no longer dependent on a specific service provider. All our services are in the Microsoft cloud, which we own ourselves. That doesn’t mean that yellow arrow wasn’t essential in the process. On the contrary, without them, we would never have been able to use the platform in such a meaningful way. They customised it completely for us. What we don’t use or need is not visible or neatly excluded. The periodic security scans carried out by yellow arrow are also more than welcome. In just a few weeks, we made our environment a lot safer without compromising on user-friendliness. And if our needs change or an important innovation presents itself, yellow arrow ensures that we are aware of this and that it is applied seamlessly to our digital workspace. This way, we can also immediately respond to unexpected situations and continue to develop. Think, for example, of the measures we had to take around the Coronavirus outbreak”.

Pioneer

Back to NextMatters. How are we going to handle that? Pierre continues: “Windows Virtual Desktop offered a solution. Based on this service, yellow arrow integrated a traditional client-server application in Microsoft Azure, without renewing or modifying the application. The last thing was just not happening. The result is that we can now work safely and independently of time, location and device over the internet. NextMatters has also become much faster as a result. Later it turned out that yellow arrow had just written a piece of history: they were the first in the Netherlands to do the trick of making NextMatters available in this way. Not bad!

Flawless commissioning

Everything is there. But how was the new working method implemented and received? Pierre is clear: “The whole team is enthusiastic. We no longer have unnecessary packages, we receive relevant updates on a regular basis, we are not in the grip of an IT-partner and we work in a simpler and more focused way. What more do you want? When Workspace 365 was launched, yellow arrow organised a relaxed training course in which the entire organisation was included and informed. This way, we immediately discovered the tricks in the system and were able to get to work in a sensible way. And there were no start-up problems. The service is also great; all employees are delighted with the smooth and informal contact. Is something unclear or are you running into something? Just one phone call and it will be solved. No hassle with queues or problems that have to be dealt with. That’s how collaboration should always be!