NASCAR drives toward Office 365 adoption

Stephen Byrd, the director of Technology Integration and Development at NASCAR took to Microsoft’s Office 365 blog today to detail how the auto racing sport is adopting Office 365. The post addresses how Office 365 helps logistics, the sharing of information during races, and much more.

While engineering and race cars are important in NASCAR, simple tasks such as collaborating on documents and sharing files are also essential to a NASCAR race weekend. As pointed out by Stephen Byrd, by being 25 percent migrated to Office 365, including SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, NASCAR is able to use these Microsoft services to more easily set up the compound infrastructure, arrange catering, and coordinate travel for employees. For instance, SharePoint Online collaboration team sites eliminated the need to print out runbooks, and rely on email to make sure everyone had correct information before a race. Stephen Byrd explains:

That has fundamentally changed with the introduction of Office 365 and, specifically, SharePoint Online collaboration team sites. Using SharePoint Online, we created a brand-new intranet called Inside Track that employees use to collaborate simultaneously on documents, update spreadsheets in real-time and securely access the information they need on the road or from the track. Productivity is at a peak level in the company, and we’re setting up new races with maximum efficiency.

Additionally, and as we previously detailed in our interview with Matthew Cochran from Hendrick Motorsports, NASCAR is also piloting Microsoft Teams to take chat-based teamwork to the next level. NASCAR hopes to use Teams to ascertain if a penalty has been handed out, rather than hopping on a radio channel or the phone. The auto racing sport also felt confident that the Microsoft cloud-based products are among the best in their class when it comes to cloud security, and points that with Office 365 and a custom app built in PowerApps, they can easily manage data access for all of our employees and hundreds of freelance contractors.