What is Office 365 / Microsoft 365?
Office 365 (now Microsoft 365) is a set of tools provided by Microsoft designed to help companies, not only collaborate and communicate, but to also share knowledge, manage processes and create tools. Above all, it is a cloud-based suite of products, which extends their original Office suite of products, including: Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Being that we are an Office 365 consultancy, we offer both Office 365 consulting services, or an Office 365 consultant to work in-house. Moreover, we help companies with their office collaboration, reporting and office processes. All of our Office 365 consultants have been managing Office 365, since its launch, for some of the UK’s largest companies.
Included in the Office 365 Suite (among many others)
SHAREPOINT
Firstly, we have SharePoint, the core collaboration and file storage tool at the heart of Office 365. Mainly used to house the intranet, file storage and team collaboration sites.
POWERAPPS
Another tool is PowerApps, designed for ‘non-techy’ Office 365 users to create their own desktop, tablet and mobile apps, without the use of code. PowerApps also offers ready to use templates, including timesheets and holiday bookings, making development a breeze.
POWER AUTOMATE
A powerful workflow tool, which cuts down on day to day tasks by automating your processes. Power Automate also has the ability to connect and work with over 200 other popular tools and apps, which includes popular tools like ‘Dropbox’ and ‘Salesforce’.
POWERBI
Make use of your data, by creating visually appealing and easy to read reporting dashboards. Giving you the ability to create useful analytics.
MICROSOFT TEAMS
The new face of Office 365! Designed to drive teamwork. Coupled with SharePoint, Teams not only helps you share files, but also connect with others through group and one-to-one chats.
YAMMER
As a result of social media trends, Microsoft created Yammer. In other words, it’s Microsoft’s answer to Facebook for business. Chiefly, it’s a business focused social media platform, that includes great integration with the other apps in the Office 365 suite. Which also has the ability to post/share and create communities.
AI
AI is the future of tech, so of course Microsoft has to offer something. The AI builder helps your tools learn what to do with your data.
OUTLOOK / EXCHANGE
Lastly, (but not least), we have Outlook, the go-to email client for most offices around the world. Also, by far the most used 365 app for most companies. The great thing about Exchange being part of the Office 365 suite is the great integration you get between the other apps and your email service.
Want to Learn More?
We offer a FREE one hour consulting service, to help you better understand the Office 365 suite and how it can benefit you. Of course, you will be under no obligation to buy any of our services.
PROBLEMS LOTS OF COMPANIES DON’T REALISE
DON’T REALISE
The first thing to remember is that Office 365 was designed by Microsoft to make life easier for staff. It acheives this by helping to reduce the strain on staff through online tools. However, from what we’ve seen as Office 365 consultants, is that most of the time it can have the reverse effect. Most of our clients come to us for help, as they have purchased this exciting suite of products, rolled it out to their staff, but have no idea how to setup and configure correctly.
This causes huge issues with user adoption and user experience, putting most staff off before they have even given it a try. More importantly than this, not having Office 365 properly setup can cause major security and compliance risks.
SOME KEY ISSUES COMPANIES HAVE
FEATURE OVERLOAD
As part of the Office 365 suite, you get a lot of products. Each product is rich in features and services, which more often than not, no-one uses. End users often can’t get things done, because they can’t figure out how. Office 365 consulting services will setup your tenant specific to your companies needs. Remove any unneeded features. And provide a sleek user experience to your end users, surfacing what people need, when they need it.
GOVERNANCE
With the introduction of Microsoft Teams and Power Platform, end users now have much more freedom to create workspaces, solutions and apps. This is great, but if you are a large company this can often spiral out of control. We often deal with clients who have environments that have become a vast mess of unmanaged data and half built, solutions.
WHICH APP SHOULD I USER FOR THIS?
This is a very common question we hear from end users. With all these products, it can be confusing which app to user for what. “Where should I store my files? Teams or SharePoint?”, “Where Should I create a community? Yammer, or Teams?”. These are questions we hear frequently. A good Office 365 consultant will setup your tenant, so these things are obvious to your users.
USER ACCESS SETUP
Companies can often struggle setting up the correct user access. This can not only cause user frustration, when they can’t access what they need. But also causes security issues and data breaches, especially if you are sharing data externally.
Our Office 365 Consulting Services Can Help You Iron Out These Common Themes.
We offer a free tenant check. One of our Office 365 consultants will do a full review of your environment and identify any issues you may have.
Why You Need Microsoft Office 365 Consulting Services?
Microsoft offers a huge package in their Office 365 suite. A lot of firms purchase the tools, but don’t fully know the power of what they have in place. An Office 365 consultancy can help you with that. Office 365 will work OK out of the box, but without the help of Office 365 consulting services, you won’t get the full benefit. That is because there is a vast amount of security, configuration, compliance, and other settings in Office 365. Moreover, These settings must be configured, based on your firms specific needs.
When we provide our Office 365 consulting services, our professionals often see large breaches in security and compliance policies. Either this, or they aren’t maximising the potential of the Office 365 suite.
Key improvements an Office 365 consultant make
SETUP
If you are still yet to begin your Office 365 journey, we can get you up and running. This is a great chance for you to get things setup correctly, from the outset. To get started, on of our Office 365 consultants will do a deep dive into your tenant, to identify any concerns.
SECURITY
A major issue an Office 365 consultant is faced with far too often. We can review your full security setup and minimize any security threats.
USER EXPERIENCES
Tech should help staff do their work, not get in the way. Our Office 365 consultancy identify user journeys specific to your company and apply configurations based on their needs. Making tools available to them, when they need them.
INTRANET
The source of your companies information and company wide comms. Our Office 365 consultancy can offer a world class intranet, that can be accessed through the browser and Teams.
GOVERNANCE
Don’t let things get out of control, causing a headache down the line! An Office 365 consultant can put automated services in place, to manage and maintain your environment. Saving you time and money doing this manually.
MIGRATIONS
Still have some (or all) of your data on file servers? Or held in multiple locations? Our migration specialists can safely and securely move your data to Office 365.
Choosing Between an in-house Office 365 Consultant and Office 365 consulting services
A lot of companies opt for hiring an in-house Office 365 consultant. As a result, they can provide ongoing development, consulting, and support for the business. Also, having someone in-house can help your companies staff adopt the apps and provide on-going user training. This is great in an ideal world, but sometimes a company might not have the resources to have an Office 365 consultant on a full time basis.
Another issue with having someone in house, is that you will often end up with bloated IT systems with many unused tools and solutions. Caused by the in-house dev either creating vanity projects in gaps between high priority projects. Or worse, eating into your budget by doing nothing between projects. So why not just get someone in when you have something that needs doing? It will save you money in the long run.
In that case, an Office 365 Consultancy services can be of great benefit here. An Office 365 consultant can come in and provide expertise as and when you need it. Then later, providing training to a small group of super users to prepare your team, to tackle issues and create solutions themselves.
Why Choose Microsoft?
As you probably know, Microsoft aren’t the only company that provide these tools. There are plenty of other similar tools on the market. Below we have listed a few reasons why we believe the Office 365 suite is the way to go, and why we choose to work with them exclusively.
COST
Always a key point to any product choice. Choosing Office 365 is a great way to save money. The licences are a really cheap for most packages, but where you really get value for money is the amount you get for the cost.
INTEGRATION OF APPS
Most people stick with Microsoft due to how well all apps work together. You don’t need to use complex APIs and coding to push data between products, they all built to work seamlessly with each other.
RELIABLE & RECOGNISED
Being one of the worlds largest companies, Microsoft is a trusted an widely used provider. Recognised by many as a leader in this space. Including Gartner who have named Microsoft as the leader for many years.
SECURITY
Being a world leader in tech, needs world leading security. This is something Microsoft doesn’t lack, which is proven as they are used by most government organisations.
OFFICE 365 LICENSING
In typical Microsoft fashion, the licencing modal for Office 365 can be hard to make sense of. That’s because there are lot’s of apps to licence and lot’s of levels of licencing you can have. Of course, you can head over to Microsoft to check out their licencing here. Alternatively, one of our Office 365 can give you a breakdown of how the licencing works, for free!
We can offer you a FREE licencing consulting session to help you make sense the licensing modal.
How Office 365 Consulting Services Help Get End Users On Board
No one likes change! As a result, it can be a very tricky task getting your users to embrace it within you business. Therefore, a good Office 365 consultancy will provide user training and easy to read guides to help end users adopt Office 365. After all, if your users don’t know how to use your apps they won’t! They will stick to ways of working they know work for them.
As part of every project we complete, we handover simple and easy to read guides for end users. We also provide power user training, to empower a few members of your team to take on admin tasks. Furthermore, we give end user training, to get your users excited about their new tools.
How Our Office 365 Consulting Services Can Help You
In conclusion, our Office 365 consultancy services are the best in the business. Firstly, our Office 365 consultants have worked with some of the UKs biggest companies, providing them with professional developers, Office 365 architects and Office 365 consultants. Secondly, we can provide expertise on-site, or remotely and our aim is to make your Office 365 setup as user friendly as possible.
OUR NEW SHAREPOINT PACKAGES
We are also the only SharePoint consulting firm in the UK, to offer quick and affordable SharePoint intranet packages. Aimed at helping small and medium sized businesses get up and running with SharePoint quickly.
