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Overnight, thousands of Microsoft employees moved to the new Microsoft Edge browser without knowing it, including those in the company’s sales and marketing organization. When they signed into their machines the next morning, their browser experience was substantially improved.
That’s because Herman Forrest, senior program manager, and the Microsoft Digital team strategically timed and sequenced the release to minimize any possible disruptions to company employees.
“Any rollout is intrusive, but this product was built as a lift-and-shift,” Forrest says. “The deployment shuts down the browser, brings it back up after the new Edge is installed, and it doesn’t look like you’ve closed out anything. That’s unique.”
In particular, the new, speedier browser is helping sellers in the Microsoft Global Sales and Marketing Organization have better meetings with customers, something you can read more about later in this story.
[Learn how Microsoft Digital got ready to deploy Microsoft Edge across Microsoft and how Microsoft Digital has streamlined the way Windows Updates work for employees.]
Over the past two months, Forrest and his colleague Daniel Manalo, a senior service engineer, have been carefully managing the rollout of the new browser across all of Microsoft. “We have to do this as silently and un-intrusively as possible,” Manalo says.
Microsoft Digital has been using deployment rings to systematically install the browser on the devices of 150,000 employees over several weeks.
“This deployment followed a fairly standard process,” Forrest says. “We divided the rollout into five different waves, scaled to make sure everything worked as expected. We then gave each wave a buffer so Microsoft Digital had time to identify and resolve any concerns.”
Staggering the waves helped everything flow smoothly.
“We always start with an inner ring, then deploy to a control group of 5,000 employees. When it’s time to move to the next wave, we deploy to another 50,000, followed by the rest of the company,” Manalo says.
Gaps are scheduled between deployments to manage helpdesk and Microsoft Digital team capacity, so any snags can be addressed before the app is rolled out to the rest of the enterprise. But for this rollout, those gaps in the deployment plan ended up being unnecessary.
“We trained our helpdesk to be ready for questions from employees,” Forrest says. “We also watched Yammer closely to see if any concerns bubbled up there. At the end of the day, there really weren’t any issues.”
Meanwhile, Corinne Kuchling, a Microsoft Digital business program manager in communications, stepped in to help with readiness efforts.
“Communications and readiness is all about raising awareness of changes before they occur,” Kuchling says. “You want employees to understand the benefits of the new product, but also want to give them a way to opt out if they have a business reason for keeping Edge Legacy active.”
Across all five deployments, Kuchling and the communications and readiness team sent emails to employees to announce the upcoming deployment.
“We had a high open and click-through rate for these emails,” she says. “Company-wide, only 138 employees requested a delay in moving to the new browser, usually because they needed access to the legacy version for compatibility testing—that’s low. The majority wanted the new Edge—desire demanded it.”
These efforts alerted employees to the overnight deployments run by Forrest and Manalo and directed them to an internal Yammer group for questions and feedback.
“You can’t easily scale responding to feedback over email,” Kuchling says, “but when you have a centralized forum, it means questions that we answer benefit all employees, not just the person asking.”
To date, there have been very few questions or concerns about the deployment.
As of today, deployment of the new Microsoft Edge is complete. Forrest, Manalo, Kuchling, and the Microsoft Edge product group have been looking forward to this moment.
“We really thought Microsoft employees would love it, and, through survey results and just talking to them, we’re seeing that they’re really enjoying it,” Forrest says. “The strong result echoes the positive results we saw during early testing.”
Boosting the browser for sales and marketing
Late last year, Johan Bosch asked Forrest and the rest of the Microsoft Edge deployment team if they could improve how the legacy version of Microsoft Edge and non-Microsoft browsers perform during meetings between sellers and customers.
In particular, Bosch, a director of field delivery and adoption from Microsoft Digital, and leaders from the company’s Global Sales and Marketing Organization (GSMO), asked for improved performance in Microsoft Power BI and an internal sales insights tool during live client presentations.
“In a normal meeting, you need BI decision-making to be sub-five seconds, otherwise you can’t be responsive in a live setting,” Bosch says.
GSMO spans 14 regions across 128 different countries and relies on business intelligence to showcase the power of Microsoft’s cloud services in the field. Real-time data is an important tool for the team.
“When we go to a customer, we showcase a dashboard in real time—no retro data,” Bosch says.
So, if the complex ecosystem of real-time intelligence lags, the 32,000 Microsoft sellers, managers, and leaders who make up GSMO enter meetings with a disadvantage.
At first, Bosch and Forrest looked at Microsoft Power BI.
“We thought maybe the graphs, data lines, and information displays were slowing things down,” Bosch says.
But when Microsoft Digital examined performance metrics, they quickly identified the source of the problem: the browser.
“Their users were having a poor experience with the tools,” Forrest says. “Speed, performance, compatibility—so we decided to leverage our own technology and sync everything up.”
Enter the new Microsoft Edge, the company’s Chromium-based browser.
“I normally don’t trust silver bullets, but when we looked at the beta release of the new Edge, we realized there was a 30–50 percent increase in performance by making the switch from the legacy version,” Bosch says.
Forrest and Bosch continued to observe devices for performance.
“We got to the point where we were looking at over 450 reports and dashboards to monitor the ecosystem,” Bosch says. “We were measuring every area, every discipline, and every role.”
And the common denominator?
Those who switched over to the new Microsoft Edge saw a noticeable boost in performance compared to the legacy version.
Everyone seeing this data was fascinated, but the opt-in nature of the beta meant only about 30 percent of the team initially used the product.
“Change management isn’t easy,” Bosch says. “People have an emotional connection to their browser. They’re not going to voluntarily move to a new system until you demonstrate a benefit.”
And for someone out in the field, they’re focused on selling, not necessarily being first in line to play around with a new beta.
That’s when communications and readiness stepped in. Working closely with Bosch, the team focused early efforts on gaining GSMO leadership sponsorship.
“When a vice president or manager uses the new Edge in their discussions, others want to do so as well,” Bosch says.
That top-down level of adoption helped demonstrate the benefits of the new browser. Word of mouth and clear communications helped spur interest.
The beta version of Microsoft Edge made it easy. There were no technical glitches and compatibility was tested up front. That gave Bosch and the GSMO team certainty about the product.
As sellers saw a measurable boost, others took it upon themselves to self-host and self-install the beta. It wasn’t a typical deployment, but over the next six months, Microsoft Digital saw Microsoft Edge installs climb to 69 percent across GSMO. That number surged higher when the final product was released in January, before the company-wide rollout.
“What we have now is 32,000 delighted GSMO users,” Bosch says. “It was the right thing at the right time. With everyone working from home now, that boost in performance is noticeable even when a user has a degraded quality of bandwidth.”
Using what was learned from the pilot for the company-wide rollout
Less than one year after being approached by GSMO leadership, Forrest and his team have completed deployment of the new Microsoft Edge across Microsoft.
“Our goal was to make sure the browser was ready by the Microsoft Ignite conference,” Forrest says. “The early pilot with GSMO was the first indication of how well this would work. Now everyone has access to this powerful product.”
Kuchling used the experiences from the GSMO test to inform the bottom-up readiness strategy for the enterprise-wide rollout.
“GSMO users’ overwhelming positive experiences and feedback helped us illustrate a number of scenarios for the broader employee base,” Kuchling says. “We could then demonstrate how using the new Microsoft Edge exceeds expectations and enhances productivity.”
The change has been transformational and the timing couldn’t have been better. As workplace environments shift to home offices, the new Microsoft Edge makes things easier for employees.
“Because of its integration with Office 365 and Bing, the new Microsoft Edge speeds up access to important documents, reduces clutter, and accelerates productivity,” Kuchling says.
Early feedback from employees has been positive.
“The feedback I’ve received is that people love Edge,” Forrest says. “Once they start using it, they use it as their default browser.”
Interested in the new Microsoft Edge for your organization? Download offline installers and pilot it today.
Read these tips for using the new Microsoft Edge while working remotely.
Learn how Microsoft Digital got ready to deploy Microsoft Edge across Microsoft.
Learn how Microsoft Digital has streamlined the way Windows Updates work for employees.
