Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Honeywell Strengthens Security, Improves Efficiency with New Productivity Software
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing—Aerospace
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, and with 60,000 employees working from 97 sites worldwide, Honeywell Aerospace provides commercial, defense, and space products; systems; and services to the aerospace industry.
Business Situation
As part of a larger initiative to standardize the set of applications on its desktop computers, Honeywell wanted to strengthen desktop security and enhance user productivity.
Solution
Honeywell upgraded to Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007 for its enhanced security features and productivity benefits.
Benefits
Productivity-enhancing tools
Rapid user training
Strengthened security
More efficient use of resources
Better collaboration / “The security changes Microsoft has made to their latest Office 2007 suite, in particular the evolution from binary file formats to XML format, serve as yet another layer of defense against malicious code.”
Rich Mason, Chief Information Security Officer, Honeywell Aerospace
Honeywell Aerospace, a division of Honeywell International, manufactures and provides integrated avionics, engines, systems, and services to the global aerospace industry. In an effort to further strengthen security and ease maintenance and support, the company is deploying a standardized set of applications to each employee’s computer. To take advantage of security benefits and other advancements, Honeywell Aerospace included Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007 in its new desktop image. As the company deploys the new image to 60,000 users worldwide, employees are experiencing significant productivity gains from the programs in the 2007 Office system. Additionally, because of the enhanced security of the 2007 Microsoft Office release, Honeywell Aerospace expects to experience higher uptime companywide.
Situation
Honeywell Aerospace, a division of Honeywell International, manufactures integrated avionics, engines, and systems for aircraft manufacturers, airlines, business and general aviation, the military, space operations, and airports worldwide. Although company headquarters are located in Phoenix, Arizona, Honeywell Aerospace’s 60,000 employees work from 97 locations across the globe, bringing to market cutting-edge products and technologies that can be found in almost every type of aircraft in nearly every region of the world.
In 2006, Honeywell Aerospace embarked on a large-scale project to strengthen IT security and to simplify desktop support and administration by reimaging its desktop and portable computers with a standardized set of applications. The company had been supporting and maintaining four different desktop software images and wanted to consolidate to a single image. In deciding which desktop productivity tools to include in the new image, the company had two primary considerations: security and productivity.
Gina Armstrong, the Project Manager at Honeywell Aerospace who is responsible for the standardized desktop deployment, says, “We are a manufacturing company, and we must do everything we can to keep productivity high. This includes protecting our networks from virus attacks. We need to be able to focus our attention on sending out proposals and bids and, generally, bringing products to market quickly.”
Chris Nguyen, Manager of Infrastructure and Planning at Honeywell, is also responsible for the deployment of the standardized desktop. He adds that because Honeywell Aerospace’s employees share information through e-mail from locations around the globe, “reliable, highly secure desktop productivity tools are essential to maintaining the safest environment possible.”
In short, Honeywell Aerospace wanted to include the most secure, most advanced productivity tools in the standardized desktop image that it provided to its employees.
Solution
“We saw a lot of enhancements in the 2007 Office system that offered additional security,” explains Nguyen—specifically, the improved security features in the Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client software and the Open XML Formats in the 2007 Office release. “And in terms of productivity tools, we wanted to be ahead of the curve.” For these reasons, Honeywell Aerospace wanted to deploy Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007. However, before senior management would approve the decision to include the suite in the desktop image, the standardized desktop deployment team had to prove that the suite was stable, as well as demonstrate a plan for adequately training employees on the updated user interface to ensure that they would become productive quickly.
In April 2007, the company entered the Rapid Deployment Program for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. After comprehensively testing Office Professional Plus 2007 for three months in a lab setting at Honeywell Aerospace’s Sunnyvale, California, location, the team expanded testing to 40 IT staff members and product engineers throughout the United States. These 40 users approved the stability of the product, and the test group was further expanded to 1,400 users at the company’s Torrance, California, location. Seeing the success of this final test phase, senior management gave the go-ahead, and Armstrong and Nguyen’s team began the wider rollout of Office Professional Plus 2007. In the first phase, the suite was deployed as part of the new, standardized desktop image to roughly 7,000 users at locations in Phoenix, Arizona; Redmond, Washington; Kansas City, Missouri; Chihuahua, Mexico; and Puerto Rico. The company is currently planning the deployment to its Asia locations and expects to be fully deployed to 45,000 users by early 2009.
The first users of Office Professional Plus 2007 at Honeywell Aerospace were offered optional, one-hour-long “Tips and Tricks” training sessions from the Microsoft account team. However, to ensure that all users received adequate training, the company included the Get Started tab as an add-in to the Ribbon, a navigational element of the Microsoft Office Fluent™ user interface. From the Ribbon, the Get Started tab provides users with a direct connection to a variety of training tools, including video demonstrations; interactive tools that show where commands and buttons of the programs in the 2003 release appear on the Ribbon; and access to free, online training courses that help users get the most out of the 2007 Office release quickly. The tab, available as a download from the Microsoft Office Online Web site, is included in each image of Office Professional Plus 2007 deployed to Honeywell Aerospace employees.
Benefits
With its deployment of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, Honeywell Aerospace has been able to give the employees responsible for bringing its innovative products to market—its engineers, IT staff, business managers, marketers, administrative staff, and executives—the most current productivity tools. Honeywell has also strengthened the security of its IT environment by way of this deployment, and made it easier for employees to collaborate.
Productivity-Enhancing Tools
Employees such as Kathy Trent, Executive Administrator at Honeywell Aerospace, are finding that the simplified nature of the Office Fluent user interface makes it easier for them to find the features they need. And the enhancements to Office Outlook 2007 are proving to boost productivity significantly. For example, Trent says, “When changes are made to the time or location of a meeting, I receive informational updates with the changes highlighted. This makes it much easier for me to locate the information that has been modified, and to easily and immediately identify when a meeting invitation is out-of-date. This saves me a lot of time because I manage the calendars of six of ourexecutives.”
Theo Gibson, IT Director at Honeywell, says this about the ability to view multiple users’ calendars sidebyside or in a transparent overlay view: “Many times a day, I schedule meetings with many different people. The ability to see their calendars stacked one upon the other allows me to easily determine their availability. The few minutes I save each time I do this is really significant because I am always up against tight schedules and deadlines.”
Another important feature of Office Outlook 2007 for Honeywell Aerospace is the To-Do Bar, which provides a consolidated view of a user’s calendar, appointments, tasks, and flagged mail. “Right from the To-Do Bar, we can assign tasks to ourselves or others,” says Nguyen. “It’s a faster, more streamlined experience.” In the Task window on the To-Do Bar, users can create and type notes about a task; indicate start and due dates; select status, priority, and reminders; attach files to a task; assign the task to team members; or mark the task as complete. Enhanced integration between tasks and the calendar also helps Nguyen work faster. “There is a lot of benefit in being able to assign a task and have it go seamlessly into a user’s calendar. It means you don’t have to block off the time for the task separately.”
Currently, Nguyen’s team is investigating ways to use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds in Office Outlook 2007 to minimize clutter in users’ e-mail inboxes. With RSS in Outlook 2007, Honeywell Aerospace can distribute internal newsletters, informational e-mail, and other communications that otherwise are delivered to an employee’s Inbox. “We’re really looking forward to taking advantage of this feature,” says Nguyen. “Sorting through the many e-mail messages we get in a single day is a real pain point for us, and RSS could help significantly.”
Honeywell Aerospace engineers rely heavily on the Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software. In previous versions of the software, engineers had to maintain multiple spreadsheets of a single report or type of imported data that exceeded the capacity of a single spreadsheet. Office Excel 2007, however, supports much larger spreadsheets, up to 1 million rows by 16,000 columns, which allows the company’s engineers to work with massive amounts of data in a single spreadsheet. Other row limits have also been increased—for example, the number of rows allowed in a PivotTable® chart have been expanded from 64,000 to more than 1 million. “This enhancement will definitely provide efficiency benefits to our engineers because they’ll be able to use and maintain fewer spreadsheets,” says Nguyen.
The company is also experiencing higher efficiency and reduced costs due to the SaveAs PDF add-in for the 2007 Microsoft Office programs. With a few mouse-clicks, users can save a Microsoft Office document, presentation, or spreadsheet as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file within the 2007 Office system programs, without requiring third-party software. The convenience of the Save As PDF feature helps Honeywell Aerospace deliver project proposals and other documentation to its customers faster and more efficiently.
Finally, users are able to work with presentations more efficiently because they can manipulate the rich SmartArt® graphics in the Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007 presentation graphics program more easily than graphical elements in previous versions. Gibson says that “the new SmartArt graphics help me create a presentation in a fraction of the time it used to take.” Prior to using Office PowerPoint 2007, engineers frequently used third-party software to create diagrams that they needed to include in their presentations to executives and customers.
Rapid, Cost-Effective User Training
With the Get Started add-in, users at Honeywell have been largely self-sufficient in learning the 2007 Microsoft Office release. “The Get Started tab has been very popular with our user base,” says Armstrong. “If someone is feeling at all uneasy about the new tools, a technician can point out the tab, and the training begins. With these training tools, people can find out how to do the things they knew how to do in the 2003 versions of the programs. The tab gives them the ability to explore. It’s a much better, more interactive experience than just sending them to a Help file. The tutorials in particular have been very useful.”
Armstrong adds, “In the past, we’ve also provided third-party–produced training documentation for Microsoft Office—at an additional cost to Honeywell. The Get Started tab saves us money because it really does replace third-party training.” Additionally, because the Get Started tab links to online, up-to-date resources, it does not run the risk of becoming out-of-date as product updates and enhancements are delivered.
Strengthened Security
Nguyen says that important security features of Outlook “are much improved in the 2007 version.” He cites Outlook E-mail Postmarking, which helps to reduce spam to a user’s Inbox by adding a unique postmark to e-mail messages. Because the postmark requires a fraction of additional computer-processing power, spammers are likely to turn off the feature. Therefore, when a user receives an e-mail that is not postmarked, there is a high likelihood that the message is spam, and Office Outlook 2007 recognizes that.
Also, the enhanced Junk E-mail Filter, which evaluates each incoming message for suspicious content, provides Honeywell Aerospace employees with protection against phishing attacks in e-mail. But most importantly, says Nguyen, “Office Outlook 2007 helps protect users from inadvertently downloading malicious code because it disables embedded content in attachments, including scripts, macros, and ActiveX® controls, while a user is previewing the attachment—that is, while quickly viewing the attachment in the Reading Pane without actually opening it.”
The company also plans to take advantage of the Open XML Formats in the 2007 Office release, to improve security. Using Open XML Formats will make it easier for Honeywell Aerospace to identify and isolate files with embedded code and macros, thus providing the ability to identify and remove personally identifiable and business-sensitive information, including user names, comments, and file paths. As a U.S. defense contractor, Honeywell Aerospace makes security a top priority. Rich Mason, Honeywell Aerospace’s Chief Information Security Officer, says, “The security changes Microsoft has made to their latest Office 2007 suite, in particular the evolution from binary file formats to XML format, serve as yet another layer of defense against malicious code. Microsoft’s new philosophy of secure design and development is increasingly evident and makes them a worthy ally in the security trenches.”
More Efficient Use of Resources
Once the deployment is complete, Honeywell Aerospace will begin to save files in the Open XML format. Because the size of each Open XML file is smaller, this will allow the company to use disk space more efficiently and minimize bandwidth consumption as files are sent through e-mail. The company also plans to deploy the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, which will enable users in other divisions of Honeywell, who may be using older versions of Microsoft Office software, to open, edit, and save documents created in the 2007 Office release.
Easier Collaboration
Honeywell Aerospace is also taking advantage of the advanced collaborative capabilities of the 2007 Office system. It uses Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to manage development projects and the documents associated with these projects. It also makes use of Excel Services in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to use, share, secure, and manage Office Excel 2007 workbooks as interactive reports in a consistent way throughout the company. It relies on the shared calendars feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007, which teams can use to coordinate scheduling and which can also be connected to individual user’s Office Outlook 2007 calendars. Using collaborative features of SharePoint Server 2007 such as shared workspaces with presence awareness, employees can collaborate in real-time on files and chat with colleagues about file-related questions. Says Nguyen, “The integration between the 2007 Office system servers and the 2007 Office system clients provide a significant opportunity to quickly develop solutions and improve processes.”
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
For more information about the Get Started tab, visit:
office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102146851033.aspx
To download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, visit: