Maximise your investment in Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace
My friend’s son has just joined his dad’s very successful building company.
It’s an old school operation, heavily reliant on a network of friendships and relationships for bringing in business - with every transaction, contract
and project plan printed out and stored in boxes and filing cabinets.
The firm has been run in this way for more than 30 years and the veteran team at the top are almost wilfully ignorant of technology.
“They don’t even use Sharepoint,” said the astonished son, surrounded by boxes and boxes of paper documents as he tries to get his head around
modernising his father’s company.
It may come as a surprise, but, in my experience, this is not an unusual scenario. Very successful businesses can carry on in their old ways for much
longer than those of us inside the technology world can imagine.
The crazy thing is that they do have Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace, but are using it in the most basic way – email, Excel, the occasional Powerpoint.
Nothing is stored in the cloud and they use Zoom rather than Teams for video conferencing, I have no idea why.
The truth is that many organisations are failing to maximise their investment in Microsoft’s most well-known suite of tools and are being let down by
their IT Managed Service Providers. I will come to that point in a minute.
Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace
First, let’s recap what comes with Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace:
Microsoft Office 365 and Exchange is the platform for email, calendars and contacts;
Microsoft Teams provides document storage, video conferencing and increasingly sophisticated collaboration tools;
Sharepoint provides secure document management in the Azure cloud. [Your documents in Teams are actually stored in SharePoint under the hood.]
Enterprise Mobility and Security handles device management, essential for a firm where its staff are mostly out on site.
Microsoft Power Platform
The Microsoft Power Platform applications sit alongside and expand the capabilities of Modern Workplace:
Power Automate for connecting internal & external apps, and automating business processes within & between them;
Power BI for creating business intelligence reports & dashobards;
Power Apps for quickly creating custom modern cloud business applications;
Dataverse, a cloud database service, that enables you to store your data in a scalable and secure environment, that can be utilsied by other Power Platform applications.
Better Together
Modern Workplace components are flexible and scalable, drive digital transformation and undoubtedly improve customer satisfaction. Coupled with Power Platform applications you
can take your business to a whole new level of efficiency, consistency and productivity. The two are definitely better together!
Most smart bosses (and my friend is certainly that) can quickly see the advantage of a seamless digital set-up that improves customer relationships,
while driving time and money efficiencies is a good thing.
But, until his son came on board after a stint at one of the big construction companies, he wasn’t getting the right guidance on how to actually become
a serious Modern Workplace.
This is an area that Solutions Shared have stayed away from in the past, instead focusing on more complex Dynamics 365 and Power Apps implementations, but my friend’s building company isn’t
ready for them at this juncture.
But good IT support companies should be working with their clients to help them get the most from what they have paid for.
However, I am discovering that most Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are too focused on cyber security and moving on premise infrastructure to the cloud.
They appear to have become very good at delivering stability and risk reduction, but not many are doing anything about business improvement.
So, we might as well start doing this job for them.
By the way, I’m pretty sure my friend’s son will end up running the company. And it will be a much stronger organization that he inherits…
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About the Author
John Clark
Founder | Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Consultant, Solutions Shared Ltd