CIO interview: Jon Cheyne, IT director, National Theatre

Cheyne says it was easy to convince a business to adopt Office 365, even yet people were regulating a series of choice cloud services. “I am not claiming 100% Office 365,” he says. “I consider we will have 99% Office 365 and 1% Google.”

He expects a IT dialect to assume shortcoming for adding and stealing users, while Navisite will hoop some-more formidable technical integration, such as joining to a Windows Active Directory.

As with many organisations, National Theatre staff use a lot of their possess cloud-based collection in their day-to-day work. Employees have entrance to WhatsApp, Google Drive, DropBox and Smart Sheet. “The people here have already built adult an ecosystem of mostly free-to-use cloud applications,” says Cheyne. “But they find these are tough to conduct since a business has to supplement all a users themselves, mislay them and conduct passwords.”

It is not too tough to get people to pierce to a central cloud product, says Cheyne. “What if we contend we can offer we something that has 90% of a functionality of DropBox, where we conduct all a users and if a user is away, we still have entrance to all their data?”

He has started regulating supposed “amnesty workshops” to assistance staff pierce over to Office 365 and OneDrive. “We are holding a carrot-only approach,” he says. “We are observant if OneDrive doesn’t work, we don’t have to pierce over to it.”

But, over time, Cheyne expects other people during a National Theatre to be regulating SharePoint and OneDrive to share documents, so users who adopt it true divided will find they are drawn behind to it. “They will really implement it,” he says. “It will be on their phone and on their laptops. Eventually, we consider people will come on-board, generally if there is some kind of crisis, or a cue has been forgotten.”

Cheyne says a National Theatre is building a SharePoint-based intranet, that will embody Yammer for amicable media. But he is endangered that some of a new add-ons to Office 365 are not quite good integrated. “Microsoft is apropos a bit Google-like, inventing product pieces that do not seem to work with other tools of a Office 365 product,” he says.

Cheyne says he commissioned Teams, Yammer and Groups on his phone and found a products were not quite  joined-up. “I detected they all had one square missing. Groups has a calendar, though Teams does not have a same calendar. You have to collect one product, and then, when we get onto SharePoint, it has a possess blogging features, a possess collections and a possess search.”

This means a National Theatre is carrying to adopt some Office 365 facilities now, with a perspective to drop them in a year or two, as and when other tools of a product start charity a formation that Cheyne requires. SharePoint will continue to be used for business collaboration, though he says: “Once Yammer is some-more integrated with SharePoint, that is when we will start putting work on Yammer.”