Microsoft 365 is full of great tools, features, and apps. If your organization has already rolled out Microsoft 365, you might be wondering how to optimize your environment. Moving to a modern, cloud-based environment was likely a big change for your organization. Perhaps you’re not seeing the adoption or collaboration you were expecting. Or perhaps you’re realizing that employees aren’t using Microsoft 365 to its fullest potential. Maybe it’s a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know.” You likely have lots of opportunity to promote understanding, adoption, sustainment, and consistency.
When it comes to maximizing your organization’s investment in Microsoft 365, how do you know if you’re leaving money on the table?
- How do you know if you’re incorporating best practices?
- How do you compare to other companies in similar industries?
- How do you sustain the adoption and consistency you’ve worked so hard to achieve?
Take the quiz to find out! This short, 7-question quiz explores how well your organization is maximizing your Microsoft 365 investment.
Here are 5 ways to optimize your Microsoft 365 environment, that you can start implementing right away!
Governance
Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that control how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams work together to achieve its goals. Without an effective governance plan, cloud services like Microsoft 365 can become unmanageable over time. A disorganized collection of sites, permissions, and content affects findability and slows down business processes, which results in confusion, frustration, and ultimately a lack of support and engagement from users. We recommend documenting standards and polices around your organization’s use of SharePoint Online, Teams, and the Power Platform. If you don’t already have one, establishing a steering committee is a great place to start.
Templates
SharePoint has two different types of sites in the modern experience: communication sites and team sites. Each type of site has its own set of templates that contain pre-populated content, pages, and web parts that can be customized to fit the needs of your organization. We recommend using as many out of the box templates as possible to create consistency and to save time. Templates can also be used within Teams to standardize channels and make it easy for users to find the information they are looking for.
Viva Connections
Viva Connections can help you bring all of your information together in one place. We recommend making your intranet more accessible by sharing it across SharePoint and Teams using Viva Connections. Employees become more productive when the information and tools they need are at their fingertips, no matter what platform or device they are using.
Automation
You can increase your efficiency and eliminate errors with automation that’s provided out of the box in Microsoft 365. By maximizing Microsoft’s Power Platform, you can reduce costs, save time, increase productivity, speed up end-to-end processes, and remove frustration for users. Here are just a few processes that we recommend automating: requests and approvals, logging support calls, employee onboarding, and financial reporting and monitoring.
Analytics
Not only can Microsoft 365’s analytics help you track the adoption of the platform itself, you can also build dynamic reports based on the data stored within—and data in other systems. If you are not yet using Microsoft’s analytics to build a data-driven culture, Power BI has hundreds of content packs, templates, and integrations for a variety of data services, apps, and services that include preset reports and visualizations. This can be a great way to begin implementing analytics without a significant time investment.
Looking for a bit more guidance?
In order help you optimize the use of Microsoft 365 tools in your organization, Elantis offers an assessment of your Microsoft 365 maturity, along with a roadmap of recommendations.
We conduct an interactive workshop to understand your current environment, needs, and challenges in using this technology. Then, we use the results of this workshop to develop a two-year roadmap that identifies high value opportunities to consolidate and optimize your systems within Microsoft 365. We can help your organization get more value out of Microsoft 365—prioritizing the recommendations based on urgency, “quick wins,” and the logical maturation of your environment.
The roadmap will create the foundation for your upcoming IT initiatives and ensure your use of the Microsoft platform aligns with your organizational goals. We identify areas to improve the user experience, increase collaboration, gain productivity, and ultimately maximize your investment in Microsoft 365.
Elantis has extensive experience optimizing our clients’ processes and environments through best practices for enterprise content management, automation, business intelligence, and modern intranet solutions. Using Microsoft tools such as SharePoint, Teams, Power Automate, and Power Apps, we can increase collaboration, improve the efficiency of your processes, better integrate your systems, and maximize your return on investment in Microsoft technologies.
Ready to skyrocket the value of your Microsoft 365 investment? Contact us to request an assessment.
