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Rightpoint case study

How an all-in-one digital experience drives a global accounting firm

A need for a complete next-generation solution

Grant Thornton, an accounting firm based in Chicago, IL, needed a collaboration solution that offered higher level support than what the standard market offered.

A unified, custom collaboration platform

Rightpoint, a digital transformation agency, implemented Canvas, a fully-digital workspace that brings together custom features and capabilities from various Office 365 services.

A workspace platform for all

Canvas has become a valuable storage and workspace platform for Grant Thornton employees and is now home to over 11,000 content pages with plans on further expansion.

Rightpoint, an independent customer experience agency based in Chicago, IL, focuses on digital transformation in many fields including health, retail, manufacturing, financial services, and professional services.

Using data, insight, strategy, design, and technology, Rightpoint creates impactful digital experiences that transform its clients’ businesses.

From cutting-edge Modern Workplace apps and compelling customer experience scenarios to solutions that utilize Internet of Things devices and Artificial Intelligence, Rightpoint has been a Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) member since its founding.

As a part of the MPN, Rightpoint joined the exclusive Microsoft Customer Engagement Alliance, consisting of five industry leading partners that work to consistently redefine the field. Adding to its MPN membership, Rightpoint has earned five gold competencies across many Microsoft business productivity and cloud solutions.

The need for a deeper solution

Grant Thornton is an accounting firm headquartered in Chicago, IL, and a longtime user of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. The global company was struggling with its disparate software solutions and needed a single, unified, and personalized experience for its staff to collaborate knowledge and access important shared data. However, the customizable integration Grant Thornton required was greater than what the standard Microsoft Office suite could provide.

To develop this digital transformation experience, Grant Thornton turned to longtime partner Rightpoint, who had previously built the company’s foundational knowledge management strategy. Grant Thornton knew that Rightpoint has the skills to build a solution that would address its needs and deliver a truly next-generation, modern workspace.

“We have helped more than 1,000 companies deploy this type of system, so we have seen a lot of different scenarios and can put that experience to use for others.”

—Jeremy Williams, Senior Director, Productivity and Collaboration, Rightpoint

A complete digital workspace

Rightpoint, in close collaboration with Grant Thornton, designed and delivered a global, fully digital workspace titled Canvas. Leveraging Rightpoint’s Azure-based IP co-sell solution—Spark Workspace Accelerator—Canvas brings together custom features and capabilities from various Office 365 services including SharePoint and Delve onto a single dashboard.

Canvas leverages profile data from Microsoft Delve and provides users with a tailored experience based on the user’s service line, industry, career, and interests.

A new level of accessibility

Grant Thornton now uses Canvas as its primary channel to communicate, collaborate, and work within the firm. Employees can now share and communicate information across any device without the need for a VPN, an important feature for a company reliant on remote collaboration.

Canvas has become a valuable storage platform and is now home to over 11,000 Grant Thornton content pages. As Grant Thornton continues to leverage the Canvas solution, Rightpoint plans on expanding and improving the product with Teams integration and more advanced features including new insights based on the latest research and analytics.

“Rightpoint’s strategic reimagining of our intranet into a thoroughly modern digital workspace has profoundly changed the way our employees share and access knowledge, experiences, and insights. The integration of an advanced universal search function was a particularly valuable element of the transformation, providing a major gain in efficiency and giving us a tangible advantage in the market.”

—David Boland, Chief Knowledge Officer, Grant Thornton

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