Procura vzw/asbl is responsible for providing non-commercial IT services to several non-profit partners belonging to the Groep Beweging.net network. The specific feature of this non-profit organisation is that the various parties involved each have different objectives and therefore their own expectations in terms of IT. On premises, they worked with what are known as socialware licences combined with volume licences. When the transition was made to a more flexible collaboration tool, a solution had to be found for the license issue in Office 365.
Technology is very important for a non-profit organisation owing to the many internal and external connections. For the Office 365 rollout, the small IT team called upon the expertise of Insight to find a solution to the challenges this brought.
The Challenge
One of the challenges is to organise IT solutions that can be deployed easily within the complexity of the organisation. The list below is not exhaustive, but the members app of partner Pasar vzw/asbl, for example, is linked to one of the various internal databases, but also to a magazine and an external connection for the distribution of the magazine. Procura also manages the accounts of 36 different non-profit organisations belonging to the Groep Beweging.net network. Another example: the women’s section, Femma, often has local activities in which the volunteers who are active in the local departments can book a teacher themselves in the system. Or the recent request from partner Wereldsolidariteit to accommodate 16 external people in a collaboration tool with its own staff for shared documents and agendas. Or the editorial team of Visie, which produces the Groep Beweging.net magazine with the same name, cooperating with various partners who may or may not be part of the central IT infrastructure. Or the non-profit organisation Kompas Camping with specific accounting software and automated gate technology working seamlessly with other tools.
"The license issue can be best compared to a car - you can own two cars. and in that case, you also need two insurance policies. But everyone knows that you only need one driving licence. Insight applied this logic to our mix of licenses with socialware and ordinary licences."
Rudi Schils, head of ICT at Beweging vzw/asbl
So Procura was in search of a flexible, centrally managed collaboration tool; one of the biggest obstacles being the license issue. ‘As a non-profit organisation, you can benefit from “social licenses”, known as socialware. In an on-premises environment you can legally combine this with ordinary profiles without too many problems. But with the arrival of cloud applications, Office 365 and flexible working (any time, anywhere, any device), this model was called into question’, says Rudi Schils, head of ICT at Beweging vzw/asbl. So Procura was looking for a solution in which both profiles could also work together in a cloud environment without the cost rising exponentially. To give you an idea: a non-profit E3 profile costs about 1/5 less than a ‘commercial’ E3 profile.
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