On this Digital Workplace Today Podcast, Jill Hannemann shares how to make Microsoft Office 365 work for your organization. Jill is our Director of Advisory Services here at Portal Solutions. She joined us today to help us understand what you need to do to get the most out of Office 365. There are many components to Office 365, but their usage is not well connected. We want to help organizations get maximum return on their investment in Office 365.
Listen to this episode to hear it all, or read the show notes for an overview of the conversation and links to key items we discussed.
 |
 |
READ THE SHOW NOTES
Today we talked to Jill Hannemann our Director of Advisory Services about making Office 365 work for your organization.
What is Office 365?
Jill starts off by providing a high-level explanation of what Office 365 is. Office 365 is composed of different services that are being integrated slowly to create the ultimate productivity suite.
This includes the Office products that we know and love like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Also, components like One Drive, Exchange, Power BI and Yammer are included.
Together this a rich landscape of available products and you can access them all through the app launcher. But with so many tools, there can be confusion.
Why are companies having a hard time maximizing productivity with 0ffice 365?
Jill continues by explaining that Office 365 could, like SharePoint often is, be described as a Swiss Army knife. A Swiss Army knife is a versatile tool that is built to be everything to everyone. The truth is that it has more components than most people know how to leverage fully.
Jill shares that another stumbling block arises when companies justify moving to Office 365 based on cost savings from one or two key components. Moving the email or file storage function to the cloud with Exchange or OneDrive can provide significant cost savings. In the end that can lead to two possible outcomes:
- They don’t turn on the other available functions. Companies will simply be paying for something that they are not using and may be missing out on tools that would improve productivity. Eventually, there might be a business need they can’t solve, and they may turn to these tools for the solution.
- They turn all these functions on without a plan. This can become the Wild West and lead to significant problems down the line. For example, two lines of business may use the same product in different ways and ultimately have conflicting needs for support. Or, if employees start using the components without direction they may use a tool in a way that conflicts with compliance or regulations.
What should you do first?
Jill shares that the most important step is to learn about what the functionality and capabilities are of each of the components. Since some of the tools are unfamiliar, it can be helpful to work with a consultant firm, like Portal Solutions, to help guide you on what the features do and the best ways to use them.
Once you have an understanding of Office 365, there is no right or wrong way to start using it. A lot of companies start with Exchange or OneDrive because of the associated cost savings with these services.
Email is really at the core of most businesses. There is some disruption to move to the cloud, but with Office 365 they get the benefits of Exchange without the cost of operations on-site.
With One Drive the reason to switch is the one terabyte of available storage per user and the cost savings from hosting that data on-premises.
How should you define governance?
Governance is a topic that could be a podcast (or more) all its own but Jill explains that a well-defined but simple plan on how to leverage each component is essential to getting the most out of Office 365.
There are three basic steps to get started:
- Learn what the features do.
- Develop guidelines.
- Create a roles and responsibilities matrix.
Getting to what and when each component should be used can be the hardest conversation. Jill shares that different audiences may have different business needs. For example, each department, location, or role may need different tools to suit their needs.
What happens when there is no governance plan?
Jill explains that there are a lot of examples of problems that can result from not putting in place a good governance plan.
For example, some companies will just turn on a feature, like Yammer, and it will fail to be adopted. Let’s be honest, no one needs another tool to go check every day. If there is not defined benefit to using the feature, they will not add it to their daily routine.
Another possible outcome can be that content is abandoned because no clear ownership is developed. This resulting clutter and stale content can hurt search results and diminish the user experience for everyone.
Who is usually responsible for this?
Jill shares that this is mostly IT. They stand the most to gain in their budget from switching to Office 365. When IT is having trouble getting traction from business units, one way to get results is to find and lean on a senior leadership stakeholder that can help champion the project and drive buy-in across the business.
Conclusion
Jill thinks that good governance can open up the possibilities in a tool like Office 365 to increase productivity.
Moment of the Week
Microsoft has released the new E5 corporate license plan. This may help larger organizations get the level of support that they need but also muddies the landscape on licensing (which was already murky.)
But what does Portal Solutions wish Microsoft would do next? Jill says that she just upgraded to Windows 10, and it is buggy. So she is hoping for another release of Windows 10 for Christmas.
Don’t forget…
Portal Solutions is hitting the road for a five-stop Mid-Atlantic tour on how to get the most out of Office 365 and cloud strategy. Invitations will be coming out soon.
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Do you enjoy listening to our conversation on the latest trends and insights in the digital workplace?
Consider subscribing to the Digital Workplace Today podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.
And if you can, take a moment to review the podcast. Your feedback is helpful, and we’d love to hear what topics you would like us to cover in future episodes.
