Imperial War Museums (IWM) is a non-profit organisation consisting of five museums – IWM London, IWM Duxford, HMS Belfast, Churchill War Rooms and IWM North. The organisation's objective is to provide an insight into British military efforts from WW1 to the present day, through the preservation of artefacts and powerful interactive exhibitions.

IWM were using Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to manage user groups and permissions, however, excessive historical data and incomplete metadata was making it difficult to derive any meaningful information from AD and causing licensing confusion. With the pandemic dramatically changing the way users consume IT due to greater remote working, IWM needed a solution that would provide structure to their user data, pinpoint licensing optimisation opportunities and drive greater organisational efficiency.

The Bytes SAM team recommended adopting Quantum 365 - an innovative tool from Bytes providing complete visibility of Microsoft Office 365 health across the organisation. Featuring full integration with AD and surfaced in Power BI dashboards, the Quantum platform identifies which Microsoft Online Services (including Office 365, Dynamics, Visio and Project subscriptions) have been allocated, alongside detailed user activity, security, device and file sharing information.

Highlights include:

• A complete view of all Microsoft Online Service subscriptions purchased, allocated and used.
• Security overview highlighting who is connected to MFA and Windows Defender, as well as product adoption, usage reporting and login activity by user or department.
• AD Health Reports to support analysis of active user accounts by job title, region and department. This can be delved into further to show individual user activity.
• Licenses can be removed for dormant or inactive user accounts, or those on long-term sickness, furlough or maternity leave, with the ability to re-assign subscriptions on their return.
• User device overview showing manufacturer details, operating system, mobile connectivity and location information.
• Collaboration overview highlighting which files are being shared outside the business and where e.g. in Teams or OneDrive.

Bytes onboarded IWM to Quantum 365 and provided training to help them understand the complexities of the platform. Monthly meetings from Bytes SAM experts provided further support, helping IWM to enact real-world changes using the analytics in Quantum. The AI Tag capabilities of Quantum 365 were of particular benefit for IWM, enabling them to organise their metadata into a more meaningful structure without having to perform a widescale overhaul of AD. Having a complete overview of their licenses and user activity also enabled IWM to identify unused licenses and solutions with little usage.

Adopting Quantum 365 helped IWM to organise their AD data and this in turn provided a clearer overview of the organisation. IWM were able to assign permissions more easily, eliminate hundreds of wasted licenses and provide users with the right solutions for their role. The latter was particularly important during a time of increased remote working, when staff needed to expand their use of Office 365 solutions.

Because Quantum 365 enables easy license allocation, IWM have also been able to give application owners e.g. Dynamics, access to reports from Quantum to support their management. By having detailed insights into usage, they have been able to keep on top of which licences are in use and actively re-harvest and re-assign licences when there are new user requests. This has dramatically reduced the number of tickets their outsourced helpdesk deals with, which has resulted in a reduction in support costs as a direct result.