Tesco has chosen Microsoft's Office 365 to provide collaboration tools for employees and suppliers across the retailer's European and Asian operations.
The cloud based Office 365 productivity suite will serve as a portal for staff, Tesco said, giving access to information and company experts regardless of location.
Office 365 will now be put in place in across the company's UK head office, distribution centre, and all of its stores. Tesco sees the search functionality provided by Microsoft's software as enabling the quick sharing of ideas across its multinational operations, allowing staff to discuss ideas or quickly find the right person to answer a question.
This will involve putting in place a collaboration platform in addition to using the service as a document repository, with additional social features.
“Office 365 will enable us to be a fully connected organisation that works closely together, proactively shares knowledge, motivates loyalty and retention of employees, and encourages better working practices to ensure that we create value for customers,” said Mike McNamara, Tesco chief information officer.
“We want to put technology in the hands of all our colleagues, whether in the store, distribution center or office, so they can create value for our customers."
“We see Office 365 as an important solution to help us continue to meet that goal.”
Tesco was unable to confirm the cost of the deal at this time.
Microsoft also announced a similar deal today, providing US clothing retailer jcpenny with a similar collaboration based service using Office 365 to focus on information sharing throughout the company.
The large Office 365 deals represent further succes for Microsoft's cloud software platform, following the announcement last month that another major UK retailer Dixons would be rolling out Office 365 across its business, with SharePoint at the heart of its collaboration system. The electronics retailer said it would be making Microsoft's productivity suite available to 20,000 employees across its multinational operations.
Microsoft announced last year that it would be raising the license price of upcoming Office 2013 by as much as 17 percent, in a bid to push more customers towards using the cloud software.