How ONLYOFFICE Workspace helps KMF to organize an effective collaboration process for its employees

KMF, the leading microfinance organization in Kazakhstan, implemented ONLYOFFICE Workspace several years ago to provide their employees with a secure all-in-one platform for internal collaboration. Denis Mantel, Director of Services Support Department KMF, tells us about their experience.

About KMF

KMF is an MFI (microfinance institution) that has been operating on the market for more than 25 years. KMF’s main mission is to promote entrepreneurship, support rural businesses, and provide microfinance to women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan.

Founded in 1997, now KMF is the largest company in the country, which occupies a leading position on the market. The KMF network has 15 branches and 117 points of sale, and employs over 2,000 people.

Interestingly, KMF is one of the few MFIs in Kazakhstan to receive international funding. The company was the first partner of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development under the Green Economy Finance Programme. KMF also works with the Asian Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Proparco and other international institutions.

Key challenges and requirements within the organization

Before KMF implemented ONLYOFFICE Workspace in 2019, one of their key problems had been the inefficient use of working time by the staff. There were a lot of manual data entries after receiving numerous emails from related departments.

To effectively deal with this problem, the company considered four software solutions to boost collaboration among its employees: Office 365, SharePoint, Citrix ShareFile and ONLYOFFICE Workspace.

When opting for the right collaboration tool, the company paid attention to the following factors:

• Ability to store data within the company’s network;
• Flexible configuration of access rights based on Active Directory;
• User-friendliness and intuitive interface;
• Cost-effectiveness and licensing conditions.

KMF also had its own security standards, so the right software was expected to have integrated domain authentication, different levels of data access for users and groups and tools for encrypted data transfer.

After weighing up the pros and cons of each solution, the company decided to test ONLYOFFICE Workspace and purchase it afterwards.

Why ONLYOFFICE Workspace

Upon its implementation in 2019, the ONLYOFFICE platform was several times cheaper than its competitors in terms of 200 simultaneous connections over a 1-year period. This was an important factor for KMF.

Apart from its cost-effectiveness, ONLYOFFICE Workspace also complies with the internal security standards of the company and provided all the essential tools for collaborative work.

That’s why after a successful test period ONLYOFFICE Workspace received positive feedback from the users, and KMF implemented it on its local server.

How ONLYOFFICE Workspace makes things easier

At the moment, the KMF employees use ONLYOFFICE Workspace to perform different tasks such as creating and editing various reports, operational plans and other important documentation, co-authoring regulatory documents in real time, and managing tasks and projects.

As a result, the staff’s time to process and summarise data and documents has been significantly reduced, and more time is devoted by employees to business tasks. The departments within the company receive information faster and make decisions more quickly on the basis of real data. All this has an overall positive impact on the efficiency of the company.

These are the most useful features of the solution for the KMF staff:

• Real-time document co-editing;
• Flexible access permissions;
• Project management.

Problems on the way towards success

Although ONLYOFFICE Workspace was well received by the staff and proved its effectiveness, there are some problems.

First of all, there have been difficulties with formula support. The company hopes for more spreadsheet functionality and compatibility with Excel formulas to do even more tasks with ONLYOFFICE.

Secondly, you need another type of license to be able to set up a cluster.

Thirdly, it’s not possible to buy technical support separately on the website, which is not always suitable for the company.

However, all these issues don’t put a spoke in the wheel when it comes to document collaboration and project management.

Future plans

At the moment, the ONLYOFFICE project at KMF is on a stable footing. The company uses the existing functionality of ONLYOFFICE Workspace and plans to consider further integration with other services, such as Jira Software and Confluence, via the existing ONLYOFFICE connectors.

Denis Mantel says:

So far, ONLYOFFICE Workspace has become a standard collaboration tool at KMF. Employees understand how to use it and use it in their daily work if possible. We would definitely recommend ONLYOFFICE Workspace to other organizations and already did it several times.