Deploying Microsoft Intune Internationally at Scale

New mobility challenges within Sodexo

With nearly 412,000 employees worldwide, Sodexo is an international leader in facilities management, catering, and maintenance services for businesses. To keep pace with growing mobile and remote work adoption, Sodexo's UEM teams wanted a solution to strengthen their ability to control, configure, and secure a device fleet of 300,000 workstations and 80,000 mobile devices.

Sodexo launched a major initiative to migrate its existing Unified Endpoint Management solution to Microsoft Intune, bringing in several Synapsys Intune experts to support the implementation over a two-year engagement.

Choosing Microsoft Intune

Previously running a fairly costly on-premise solution, Sodexo wanted to unify workstation and mobile management on a single cloud-based platform. Sodexo chose Microsoft Intune, a market leader in unified endpoint management, for several reasons: native integration with the Microsoft ecosystem already in place through Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, a favorable cost model delivering significant savings while leveraging the cloud, centralized management of Windows, iOS, and Android devices from a single console, and a broad set of security features including data encryption, PIN codes, access restrictions, and compliance policies.

A layered device strategy, a strong first rollout, and international scale-up

Synapsys experts helped Sodexo's UEM teams adopt Intune, a mature product with 5 to 6 years in the market, and guided the implementation strategy behind each use case. Sodexo's device management policy was built around layered environments: a central primary layer with a limited set of applications for all group users, a primary configuration layer with certain features disabled, and a global layer compatible with the primary layer that lets each country add applications specific to its needs, balancing central control with local autonomy.

The initial rollout covered five device use cases successfully: personal and corporate Android mobiles, personal and corporate iOS mobiles, and corporate workstations. Sodexo's IT teams welcomed Intune as a way to centralize workstation management on a single platform, while local teams needed clear communication on the deployment scope, impacts, and benefits.

Since March 2022, a Synapsys workstation engineer has supported the international rollout within Sodexo's global UEM team, helping countries onboard to Intune, enforce security processes, and access self-service application libraries. The work included running technical workshops across countries to introduce upcoming products like Windows 11 and Autopilot, providing level 3 support for complex global issues, building troubleshooting documentation for level 1 support, running individual sessions with country SPOCs to track device enrollment and resolve blockers, writing PowerShell scripts, setting up reporting to track close to 40,000 devices across entities, supporting BYOD password protection projects, and rolling out Autopilot to automate device provisioning directly from the manufacturer.