Accelerating Project Management in a Hybrid Intune/SCCM Environment

Managing a 35,000-workstation environment across 1,000 sites

Eiffage's group workstation team manages close to 35,000 Windows devices, spread across nearly 1,000 sites and agencies, plus a large number of construction site locations. In January 2023, Eiffage brought in a Synapsys expert as Transition Manager within its SmartWorkplace team to ensure continuity in managing the workstation domain. The team of 5 included 2 Synapsys experts, and Eiffage specifically sought an experienced Modern Workplace engineer combining management skills, project management, and deep workstation expertise.

SCCM and Intune: a productive coexistence

Eiffage's SmartWorkplace team operates in a Microsoft environment where SCCM and Intune coexist through Intune's hybrid co-management mode, made possible by SCCM's ability to distribute workloads. While awaiting a full migration to Intune, Eiffage chose to combine both solutions, capitalizing on the power of on-premise SCCM for modules like reporting and update distribution, while gaining Intune's modern configuration and application management along with zero-trust policy support.

This transitional co-management state gives Eiffage a foundation to progressively shift its ecosystem toward a more cloud-oriented model, workload by workload.

Making the workstation a cross-functional priority

The Transition Manager's challenge was building synergy across the many departments involved in workstation management, including HelpDesk, on-site support, cybersecurity, network, Windows and Azure systems, and architecture. This meant setting up regular inter-department forums to share current and upcoming activity, as well as weekly coordination meetings within the SmartWorkplace team, alongside driving better information sharing, team involvement, and technology watch to keep leadership informed on workstation and collaboration trends.

The success of this transition management role led Eiffage to renew its trust in Synapsys, expanding the engagement into a project manager role overseeing two flagship workstation projects: migrating to Intune and rationalizing the number of secondary SCCM servers, alongside migrating to Office 365, upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and migrating mobile tablets to Intune. Synapsys led three of these five priority projects. The SCCM-to-Intune migration in particular represented more than a technology shift, reshaping processes and working methods across the entire workstation management value chain, from design through support.

The second major project tackled the historical footprint of 80 secondary SCCM servers positioned near Eiffage's agencies to store and distribute software. Thanks to SCCM's peer-to-peer capability and improved network bandwidth, that many servers were no longer necessary.