Microsoft 365: It’s all in the Migration

If you’ve heard that Microsoft 365 can revolutionise your business, you’ve heard right.

If you think it’s an off-the-shelf solution, you may have to think again.

Microsoft Office is a powerful business tool, and requires specialist migration and management in order to reap real rewards. It really isn’t plug and play, and we advise against being swayed by providers who may say otherwise.

You may well know what the product delivers; but just in case, let’s have a quick run through. The most well-known functions are access to email, calendar, your files, and access to Microsoft applications from virtually any device - on the move, at the office, or at home. Sounds particularly good at this point in time, right?

And we shouldn’t forget that this comes with comprehensive in-built security and compliance capabilities - the first to meet strict EU privacy laws.

Then you have Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, and Yammer - all of which are enjoying unprecedented usage at the moment, enabling collaboration and productivity, and allowing company culture to thrive even whilst working from home.

Finally, there's the easy-to-use single management platform and centralised tools, which allow IT teams to quickly add users, control settings and manage licensing, simplifying operation for the end user.

So what does all of this enable? Efficient, uniform operations, collaboration, and communication. Every employee has access to everything they need, wherever they are, on whatever device they happen to be holding.

If you know how to migrate and manage it, Microsoft 365 undoubtedly allows businesses to run more effectively - improving employee productivity and efficiency, providing predictable and manageable costs, and automatically updating all software as standard. But note the 'if'...

There are challenges to overcome that an experienced team will always find easier to navigate with a clear understanding of the platform's services and in order to avoid business disruption.

What are some of the challenges reported by organisations that find themselves disappointed with adoption of Microsoft 365?

• Secure set up of the mobile workforce
• Security options being configured suboptimally for specific business requirements
• Lack of support for user adoption

And of course, whilst the product can help most businesses in a variety of ways, like any other software it has limitations; few products or services out there can accurately be labelled the 'silver bullet'. The question you should be asking is - what does 365 offer specifically to your organisation, and, do the limitations of this product outweight the benefits?

For this to happen, deployment, configuration and management of the platform need to be optimal.