In almost every strategy session with a customer we hear the same thing:
We’ve invested heavily into Microsoft 365.
After a few hours on the whiteboard mapping out technology ideas, usually we’ll find a large set of untapped potential from the Microsoft 365 suite. Many organisations aren’t using all the features, have little knowledge of the security capabilities, or are simply paying twice for competing products within their own technology stack.
Having been through this loop so many times, below we’ve laid out four common areas where we have helped to maximise investments in Microsoft 365.
Identity.
We have always been great believers that a cloud strategy starts with identity.
Long before organisations started to consider rehosting, refactoring and rebuilding, they had probably already invested platforms for customer management, sales and human resources, among many others.
Surprisingly, even the largest enterprises have not fully integrated their identity to create a single unified experience. They still allow users to login to these SaaS platforms using their corporate credentials. In addition, many customers have also purchased identity tools like Okta to facilitate sign-on to these applications – only to use them for very specific one-off use cases.
After assessing each organisation’s own circumstances, in most cases we’ve landed on a consolidation of cloud identity (with multi factor authentication included) provided by Azure Active Directory. It’s part of the Microsoft 365 subscription and if deployed, can result in a 5-figure saving.
Intranet.
SharePoint Online is still one of the most underutilised areas of Microsoft 365.
Customers who’ve had experiences with either third party solutions, or that remember the days of SharePoint 2013, still feel the pain of those projects and the feeling that the hype was never quite achieved.
Whilst often an aspiration, implementing SharePoint is seen as a mammoth project involving all stakeholders across the business from Marketing to HR and Finance. Often, it’s pushed down the priority list based on the perceived risks and effort to migrate large amounts of web page content and data.
Our role is to help break this down into bitesize chunks and show customers how quickly they’ll see value. We’ve often found success by working with Marketing and HR to create engaging content, promoting certain areas such as diversity and inclusion, and centralising company communications.
The biggest challenge outside the IT department is ensuring co-workers know about SharePoint’s capabilities and what good can look like. We’ve helped to design and implement small changes to aid user adoption and help drive employee engagement. This is vital, as user generated content is key when trying to build a successful site.
Once this is in place, we help each department to organise and structure their data for migration and integration with SharePoint and Teams.
When the foundations are in place, the possibilities to drive huge amounts of productivity are endless. We’ve worked with customers to identify and automate business process, reducing effort from days to hours using Microsoft PowerApps and Flow.
Device Management.
Since covid there has been rapid adoption of Autopilot and Intune to enable zero-touch provisioning of devices to users. Whilst most customers have made great progress, we continue to see similar challenges within many environments. The most common being the delivery and maintenance of applications following the initial deployment.
To help, we’ve advised and implemented modern application delivery technologies which help to overcome the most common challenges of using Autopilot. Once such issue is mixing line of business applications (MSI) and Win32 Apps in any deployment. As they both use the ‘Trusted Installer’ service at the same time, this is an often-overlooked reason for a failed implementation.
These new application delivery technologies can also increase productivity and reduce stress on the IT team by automating patch management following the traditional patch Tuesday.
Windows Defender.
As advisors to our customers, we spend time in understanding their unique technology environments. In almost every case, there is a potential to maximise return on investment in Microsoft 365.
Reach out for a chat to understand how we can help you achieve more.
Book a short conversation here.
