Interview with STIHL IT

The company

It all began in 1926: Andreas Stihl founded his company and soon developed his first chainsaw. This invention would revolutionize work in the forest and make STIHL the world market and technology leader.

The secret of success to this day? Continually developing revolutionary innovations with the pioneering spirit of the company founder. For example, with battery technology, digital solutions, robotics and artificial intelligence. STIHL works passionately on this with the aim of constantly developing. Everything to make working with and in nature easier for customers.

Today, STIHL is the best-selling chainsaw brand in the world. With more than 19,000 employees, they are represented in 160 countries on five continents.

Individualized implementation

In this interview with Constanze Pretzler, Senior In-house Consultant for Digital Collaboration, we talked about how the technical implementation of Boardwise went at STIHL and how she perceived the topics of security, reliability and individual customization.

Constanze, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. What role did you play in the launch of Boardwise?

I coordinated the rollout internally from an IT perspective, which required collaboration with our cloud team and Boardwise's IT department, among others. My focus was particularly on structuring access rights and conducting penetration and security tests.

How did you perceive the implementation?

I was impressed by the high level of customization. At STIHL, we don't use the standard implementation, but a completely isolated, self-operated instance. This was very important to us, and the ability to implement this was particularly striking. I have only seen comparable flexibility in specially designed environments in which different source codes are used. The fact that you were able to implement this is remarkable.

What exactly does it mean that you use a self-operated instance of Boardwise?

We have interrupted the technical connection to your system. This means that your administrators do not have access to our instance and, for example, updates are not installed automatically. I take on this task, which means I always have a complete overview. The process runs smoothly and I am informed by your technical customer success team about relevant aspects or special features.

Safety tests

You mentioned penetration and security testing earlier. How did Boardwise perform?

Boardwise passed the application's security test with flying colors. This rating was actually given.

What did the tests look like?

Before introducing Boardwise, so-called "man-in-the-middle" attacks were simulated to check whether, for example, it was possible for user A to gain unauthorized access to user B's rights. The results for Boardwise were extremely positive, particularly due to the very fine-grained authorization model. Recurring security gaps or problems often occur in Azure-based applications, but we were unable to identify any such vulnerabilities in your solution.

Collaborate with Boardwise

How is the integration of Boardwise in M365?

Boardwise is currently mainly connected to SharePoint. In the near future, an integration with Teams will follow, but the initial implementation focused exclusively on SharePoint. Particularly noteworthy are the predefined filing structures, which significantly simplify the process of filing files, as there is no longer any need to consider where documents should be filed.

How was the support from Boardwise for you?

I have to say, I am extremely satisfied. Both the accessibility and the speed of response are excellent. I particularly appreciate the way feature requests are handled: they are systematically recorded and we are always informed about the progress and current status of the requests.