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Microsoft 365 Intranets
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
SharePoint and Teams Sprawl
eBook | Learn about the most common SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl issues and how to solve them. Also, gain insight into how Sprawl impacts both the end-user and IT.
Microsoft 365 Adoption
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
Digital Communication & Collaboration Advantages
eBook | Learn about the digital communication and collaboration advantages provided by a Microsoft 365 Intranet and digital workplace in our eBook.
Microsoft 365 Business Impact
Find out how to identify and measure the business value Microsoft 365 provides with examples and advice on Microsoft 365 reporting and metrics.
SharePoint Migration
Learn migration best practices, and how to best plan and execute a SharePoint upgrade or migration to SharePoint Online from file shares, legacy systems, older versions of SharePoint, and more.
Accelerating Employee Onboarding & Your Hybrid Workplace With...
Wondering how you can make sure that hybrid work doesn't derail your employee onboarding process? This webinar touches on both Employee Onboarding and Hybrid Workplaces using Microsoft 365.
Proactive Governance & Adoption in Microsoft 365
Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, discusses how organizations can get proactive about their governance with Microsoft 365.
Tackling Microsoft Teams & SharePoint Sites Sprawl
Get to the bottom of how to overcome unmanaged Sprawl in your organization by learning to tackle it with our CTO Richard Harbridge.
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Accelerating Employee Onboarding & Your Hybrid Workplace With...
Wondering how you can make sure that hybrid work doesn't derail your employee onboarding process? This webinar touches on both Employee Onboarding and Hybrid Workplaces using Microsoft 365.
Proactive Governance & Adoption in Microsoft 365
Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, discusses how organizations can get proactive about their governance with Microsoft 365.
Tackling Microsoft Teams & SharePoint Sites Sprawl
Get to the bottom of how to overcome unmanaged Sprawl in your organization by learning to tackle it with our CTO Richard Harbridge.
Optimizing organizational knowledge with Project Cortex & the...
Project Cortex, now SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva Topics, can dramatically change the way you leverage the knowledge at your finger tips!
What Makes A World Class Microsoft 365 Intranet & Digital...
Have you been wondering how to make your intranet and digital workplace world class? Our CTO is here to help get you there.
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A Look Inside Our Microsoft 365 Business Impact Whitepaper
As is typical for many technologies used at the enterprise level, building the business case for Microsoft 365 usually comes down to three simple words: Return on Investment (ROI). Executives and technology evangelists alike constantly search for ways to quantify ROI, providing tangible proof that the money put into these technology solutions produces a worthwhile and measurable payback.
Of course, Microsoft 365 is not immune to the fundamental laws of economics. Suppose the technology does not help increase company revenue, improve employee productivity, or cut expenses. In that case, few executives will commit time and resources to deploy or invest in improving adoption and usage.
Our recently updated whitepaper is designed to provide practical advice for leaders who want to put Microsoft 365 to work but wrestle with the challenges of justifying its value after deployment.
A Look Inside Our Microsoft Whitepaper
This blog will only provide a glimpse at the various sections of the whitepaper. For full details, download our Microsoft 365 Business Impact Whitepaper.
The following are the sections from the whitepaper that we will take a look at:
- Measuring and improving business impact
- Understanding and aligning business objectives
- Business Impact by Microsoft 365 capabilities
- Business Impact Examples
Measuring And Improving Business Impact
There are a few key considerations for determining and measuring business impact.
1. Identify ways Microsoft 365 can drive business impact.
- Just knowing that there is an impact is the first step.
- This whitepaper is meant to address and accelerate this step.
2. Measure the business impact.
- This should be done before Microsoft 365 technologies are implemented, while adoption/usage is being improved, after and during investment activities or as new capabilities are introduced.
- Within this whitepaper, we have provided suggestions for how you might approach measuring some of these business impacts.
3. Take proactive steps based on the measurements and insights shared.
4. Measure the business impact.
5. Repeat steps 1-4.
Gain a greater understanding of these key consideration for determining and measuring business impact in our whitepaper.
Understand And Align Your Business Objectives
For a technology investment to be relevant and for key stakeholders to care about that technology, it is critical to show that the technology positively impacts helping realize important business objectives.
It is often challenging to map the technology solutions and uses we have for technology to business objectives. This is difficult for two key reasons. The first reason is that most business objectives are not specific enough, clear enough, or detailed enough. The second reason is that it can be difficult to visualize the relationship in a way that key stakeholders will immediately recognize.
The image above is a visual example of how these platitudes (or meaningless objectives) might break down into something that has meaning to the organization and also an example of the insight waiting for you in our whitepaper.
Business Impact By Microsoft 365 Capabilities
This subsequent section will outline examples of business impact and how they correlate to key apps and services provided by Microsoft 365.
At this time, we have mapped examples and correlations between the following technologies:
Discover our mapped examples and correlations between all of Microsoft 365 in our business impact whitepaper.
Business Impact Examples
The following are categories of business impact that Microsoft 365 influences. We have included suggestions for measuring each one. Our intention with this approach is to help organizations understand that these benefits can be quantified. Also, it may not be as challenging, thanks to the richer availability of data and insights from the Microsoft 365 platform.
Throughout these measurements, it’s important to understand that each customer is unique.
Here are a few high-level suggestions when you calculate your own ROI:
- We often calculate real-world numbers using estimates for the inefficiency of productivity or cost transfer as not every resource that gets time back will be able to apply it to productive benefits for the organization at the same efficiency level.
- Never do single-point estimates. A range is extremely valuable as it communicates confidence. If it helps, consider creating a low, medium, and high value for each if a range won't work for your decision criteria. Even with further discounting for risk, if the low value is a favorable investment with a good return, that should be enough for the business decision.
- Measuring over time is important. We are cautious about doing multi-year ROI calculations where we don't discount the benefit over time since digital patterns, industry patterns, and your own employee patterns change over time.
- Keep track of all your assumptions. If someone disagrees with your calculations or is not confident in them, you can always input different assumptions or let them experiment with your model (Excel is great for this). Disagree with the suggested salary or cost of the employee? Just change those values to create more variations or professional perspectives on the ROI parameters.
Isn’t It Time You Understand the Impact You Are Having?
All corporate champions of Microsoft 365 deployment want to prove how the technology can pull its financial weight. The path to achieving this lies in understanding the variables that impact ROI evaluation.
Some of the metrics discussed in our whitepaper may vary based on how you use Microsoft 365, but the economic principles remain the same. The economic principles boiled down to: Identify the business value generated by Microsoft 365 deployments and measure it against the costs of implementing these technologies or improving their usage.
Uncover what you should be focusing on with the help of our 50+ page whitepaper on measuring the business impact of Microsoft 365.
Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements
Microsoft Inspire 2021 was another incredible global event that brought us some interesting and exciting announcements from Microsoft. If you haven’t had a chance, be sure to review the Microsoft Inspire 2021 Book of News. As a Microsoft Gold Partner across many categories and an active leader in multiple advisory boards and preview programs, the announcements are often not new to our team. However, we wanted to take a moment to highlight a few key announcements that get us the most excited.
Our 3 Favorite Highlights From Microsoft Inspire
With all of the incredible Microsoft applications moving the meter on the advancement of Digital Workplaces everywhere, you might be wondering, what are the top three announcements/updates from this year’s global Microsoft partner event, Microsoft Inspire 2021.
After discussing with our all-star team of Microsoft MVPs and award winners, we are happy to bring our top 3 highlights from Inspire.
1. Richer & More Integrated Employee Experiences
Microsoft is now leading the charge in first-party integration with popular services and products. In addition, they are making it easier for customers and partners like ourselves to integrate these apps and services across the places users already work today, such as within Microsoft Teams, or surfaced contextually through experiences like Microsoft Viva Topics in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Office.
There are now 20+ partners who have rich integration throughout Microsoft Viva experiences.
Combine this with the existing 100+ Microsoft search connectors that make it easier to provide unified search and better search and graph-based experiences. (This 100+ connector number includes 9 first-party connectors from Microsoft for popular systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, File Shares, and more.)
2. More For Less
As a company that runs its business on Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, we are also extremely excited about the richer (and now free) integration that enables us to discuss, engage around, coordinate with and work on Dynamics activities in Microsoft Teams.
Earlier this month, Microsoft made some pretty big announcements on Power Platform pricing that help companies like ours, and hundreds of our customers do more with less as it relates to business applications and solutions. By reducing the licensing costs by half, more companies can enhance digital experiences and provide meaningful applications and automation through Power Apps and Power Automate.
Costs have shifted from $40 to $20 per user per month for Power Apps per users plans, and from $10 per user/app/month to $5 per user/app/month on October 1st. This price change effectively gives already invested customers money back from their budget for more apps and automation. Also, for many who are just getting started, the promotional pricing is a lower initial cost of ownership.
This also impacted Power Portals so if you haven’t looked at them – take another look as the solutions we have been implementing with customers here are often customer or B2B facing and prove that the Power Platform doesn’t just have to be used for internal applications/automation.
Other announcements provide more ways for vendors like us to provide greater discounts or ensure what you buy through the Microsoft marketplace experiences are closer to their costs by reducing their fees from the industry standard of 20% to 3%.
3. Sustainability Initiatives & Making Sustainability More Digitally Accessible
It can be easy to underestimate just how challenging it is for a company to respond and support the important work needed to meet sustainability goals and respond to one of the most urgent crises facing out planet. However, Microsoft certainly made it easier for organizations like ours and many of our customers by releasing a new “Cloud for Sustainability” later this year.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability enables any organization to record, report, reduce, and replace their emissions more easily and effectively as they relate to IT carbon emissions, which is a great forward step. It will be much harder for organizations to avoid tackling, measuring, and working on sustainability if doing so becomes more accessible and easier to manage.
Expanding your knowledge for FREE
If you are looking for more insights into previous or future announcements, keep in mind that not only are we a Microsoft Gold Partner, but our team is comprised of Microsoft MVPs, and board members. We always have time available to share knowledge, insights, and context on Microsoft 365 and Azure that can help organizations like yourselves be more successful.
Or maybe you looking to learn more about the incredible Digital Workplace offerings from Microsoft 365 or how best to implement them? Dive into our library of resources.
14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Microsoft Inspire is a time of learning, discovery, and new and old partnerships. In the spirit of the event, we have put together a tribute to solution partners that inspire us to push the envelope with Microsoft 365 digital workplaces.
If you are looking for the top 3 highlights of the event, take a look at our blog titled "Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements" for the details.
Microsoft has Inspired 400K+ Services & Solution Companies, Globally
This partner portfolio is incredibly diverse, and it can be challenging to navigate. We have evaluated and collaborated with hundreds of active Microsoft 365 product companies to ensure our customers get the right fit from the best and brightest Microsoft partners. If you are an incredible organization and we haven’t worked with you as a partner, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Our own leadership team has managed and led dozens of Microsoft Services partners, and when we created 2toLead, we didn’t want to establish another Microsoft consultancy. We wanted to establish an organization that customers, partners, and communities know will do the right thing, go the extra mile, and have been fortunate enough to be called a generous consulting company. If you are looking to join our growing team or know exceptional people, please don’t hesitate to reach out on our LinkedIn postings we have up, as we are always hiring.
Microsoft Is Changing & So Are All Of Us
Microsoft and Microsoft 365 have been pushing the evolution of digital business practices since both of their inceptions. Microsoft 365 has grown a lot since the early years, and it only continues to advance as Teams, and SharePoint active daily users are at all-time highs, with no signs of slowing down.
There are entirely new challenges and opportunities in the Microsoft Power Platform space, with Azure, and in the growing ways, AI and cloud insights provide new ways to work and create business solutions.
It is an incredible time to be a Microsoft partner, and we are thrilled at the rate of innovation, not only because of the opportunities this creates for our customers and partners but also because it helps us re-invent, re-align, and always learn new things.
The 14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Not only has Microsoft done incredible things on its own, but it is also tethered to an incredible partner ecosystem of services and solutions. They have helped Microsoft push the envelope and/or helped to fill in some gaps that a company focusing on the many can’t always afford.
This blog will identify the partners that inspire us, why they inspire us and a brief description of what they do.
These partners include:
- AvePoint
- BA Insights
- CardioLog
- Layer2
- LiveTiles
- Orchestry
- Panagenda
- Powell
- Quest
- Rencore
- ShareGate
- tyGraph
- Tzunami
- Valo
For a little more on each partner, visit our partner page or contact us to discover if they are right for your needs.
AvePoint
AvePoint offers an incredible breadth of products and services that make it easier, and speedier, to accomplish tasks whether your organization is all in with the cloud or in a Hybrid state. These products/services include Cloud Archiving, Cloud Backup, Citizen Services, File Share navigation (from in M365), GroupHub, Cloud Insights, Cloud Management, MyHub, Cloud Governance, Policies & Insights, Cloud Records, Administrator, Archiver, Backup & Restore, Compliance Guardian Platform, Connector, Content Manager, Data Validation, Classification & Protection, Deployment Manager, Discovery Tooling, Enterprise Risk Management, File Share Archiver, Cloud & SharePoint Migration, Governance Automation, Meetings, High Availability, Office Connect, Perimeter, Records, Replicator, Report Center and Storage Manager.
https://twitter.com/AvePoint/status/1415657662226878476
Why they inspire us
AvePoint has incredible breadth in it’s offerings. It is always relevant in today’s Microsoft 365 enterprise strategy discussions. Whether it’s leveraging… MyHub for managing Microsoft 365 workspaces and creating new ones… we are always happy when we see that our customers have invested in AvePoint.
BA Insights
Connect knowledge with seekers, reward questions with results, stop sifting and start asking. BA Insight provides internet-like enterprise search for organizations that want their knowledge to be askable. They do this by providing personalized, intelligent, connected (over 80 enterprise systems), relevant (automated and intelligent meta tagging) and in-app search from anywhere.
https://twitter.com/BAinsight/status/1413209546248556545
Why they inspire us
The power of a modern, intelligent and connected search has often been out of reach for many organizations due to cost, complexity and feasibility. This has fundamentally changed with Microsoft Search, search improvements and incredible ecosystem advances like those led by BA Insight who has created smart search solutions such as connectors for 80+ enterprise systems.
CardioLog
CardioLog Analytics enables organizations to provide in-depth Office 365 analytics, insights, trends, adoption productivity and usage reports, but more importantly makes those analytics easier to engage, enhance and enforce. As an example CardioLog enables you to target users based on behaviour and enforce certain security policies that improve data safeguarding.
Why they inspire us
The way CardioLog approaches adoption is aligned perfectly with the way we encourage organizations to leverage adoption campaigns and a just in time and in place communication approach. Between the way they use analytics with built in tooling for these adoption and communication tactics as well as enforcement is something that differentiates them from some of the other analytic vendors in the marketplace and is one of the big reasons we love working with them.
Layer2
Layer2 leading solutions is the market-leading provider of data integration and document synchronization solutions for the Microsoft Cloud, focusing on Office 365, SharePoint, and Azure. More than 2.500 companies worldwide and regional partners trust in Layer2 products to keep data and files in sync between 100+ systems and apps in the cloud and on-premises.
Why they inspire us
It is almost unbelievable that a synchronization approach to integration like what Layer2 makes easier to accomplish, can provide literally millions of dollars of value in only a few months. From integrating data sources into extranet sites like supplier portals to avoiding complex integration risks and licensing impacts this is one technology you don’t want to miss out on.
LiveTiles
Organizations everywhere look to LiveTiles to provide them with top tier solutions that elevate their SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environments, innovating beyond them, no matter the size of the organization. With some of the world's most recognizable brands using their product, we would love to show you how their revolutionary digital workplace solutions offer broad and deep end-to-end capability to meet the needs of a modern digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/livetiles/status/1415642564779204610
Why they inspire us
Just look at a leading Digital Workplace vendor like LiveTiles. They have explored and assessed the gaps in Microsoft's Intranet platform and provided solutions that build on what Microsoft does well, while challenging and providing intelligently architected solutions where Microsoft falls short. They don't only do that, but they do it in such a way that it makes it easy for customers or companies like ours to further extend and enhance it easily.
Orchestry
Orchestry is a balanced platform composed of adoption tools, engaging templates, controlled provisioning, and empowering self-service to drive usage and adoption success in Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. Orchestry has pioneered a comprehensive governance, adoption and enablement tool for Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, that delivers control while empowering greater access to all users. They are a fairly new company but have years of knowledge in the companies founders that have been poured back into the solution.
https://twitter.com/OrchestrySoft/status/1414723753779597316
Why they inspire us
What’s incredible is how clever Orchestry’s approach is on making the provisioning or creation process of new Teams and Sites not only easier with excellent templating/automation, but in making the challenge of when to use what easier as well. When you combine this with the ongoing challenge on managing the lifecycle and navigation of these spaces… it’s clear that the Orchestry approach really does make a difference.
Panagenda
Panagenda’s OfficeExpert is a modular solution that significantly improves productivity, end user experience and job satisfaction using unrivaled Office 365 performance measurement and monitoring technology. The insight it can provide can greatly help large scale global customers better manage and understand how Microsoft 365 is being used.
https://twitter.com/panagenda/status/1405523122707734528
Why they inspire us
Panagenda understands large global enterprise customer challenges when it comes to Microsoft 365 and for licensing management they have always been easy to recommend, but the signals, monitoring and analytics in teams… especially when comparing against Zoom, Webex or other products/services in your own organization is incredibly valuable.
Powell
Powell Intranet and Teams offers compelling capabilities whether you are looking for newsroom publishing, events management, social communities, knowledge centers, search experiences, employee directories, analytics, better templating, improved navigation, better employee services or better corporate branding. IT departments everywhere are tasked with managing and maintaining their corporate digital workplace. The internal communications, rightfully, wants something enticing and easy-to-use but sometimes those solutions come at a cost. With Powell's intranet solution, IT and internal communications can both get exactly what they want.
https://twitter.com/PowellSoftware/status/1394943545535078406
Why they inspire us
Powell Manager and the Powell approach leans into the gap of effective design and templating that Microsoft hasn't filled by providing an extensible and intuitive experience that automates or simplifies so many things our customers and we as consultants must do to achieve a highly successful digital workplace.
Quest
Quest provides enterprise scale and well-rounded cloud solutions that are ready to take you from platform migration to cloud deployments quickly and effectively. Security and governance are other areas that their solution shines. The company has been around since 1987 and have packed those years of IT knowledge into their latest offerings that cover the breadth of Microsoft 365 services and applications.
https://twitter.com/Quest/status/1415673775077543944
Why they inspire us
Quest has a long history of providing solutions our customers need and their acquisition of Metalogix has further grown their relevant and useful portfolio of Microsoft 365 solutions for us. When it comes to Lotus Notes and a variety of other migration scenarios Quest is always at the top of our customers, and our own list as the vendor to engage for the right end-to-end approach.
Rencore
Rencore is an incredible company that provides governance automation solutions that help you stay in control of Microsoft 365. You can easily identify anomalies and trends that might affect your governance plan for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Azure, and Power Platform and automate the necessary next steps.
https://twitter.com/Rencore/status/1415317351101239304
Why they inspire us
Rencore understands the technical complexity of the Microsoft 365 platform. We love Rencore Code (SPCAF) and have used it for years helping our customers analyze and assure code quality when building on SharePoint, Office 365 and Teams. Now we loving the incredible potential of Rencore Governance as it’s focus on the whole of the M365 platform is hard not to love… There aren’t many who offer Power Platform governance improvement and automation alongside Teams and SharePoint while also considering Microsoft Stream, Dynamics and more.
ShareGate
Renown for providing an easy to use tool that has and continues to enable thousands of successful migrations for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. ShareGate is a premier solution in the migration space and can simplify and aid in the complex migration many systems to your Microsoft 365 digital workplace. They are truly the simplest way for IT to succeed with a faster transition to the Microsoft cloud.
Also, monitor your tenant and highlight ways to make it healthier based on the policies you set. Then automate and action those improvements. With many years in the industry, ShareGate, being migration specialists, saw what was happening to digital workplaces after everything had been migrated and set out to solve the issue of management and governance that comes with growth. That is when ShareGate Apricot was born, an IT first solution designed to ensure your organization can rest easy when it comes to some of the most common (and challenging) governance scenarios for Microsoft Teams.
https://twitter.com/sharegatetools/status/1394310410732511233
Why they inspire us
What’s great about ShareGate is that even after so many years of enhancements, new capabilities, and improvements it still is so darn simple to use. For so many organizations they just need an easy to learn, understand and well supported solution for migration and some of the most common management/optimization activities that you need to do and it’s here that ShareGate delivers.
tyGraph
tyGraph uses deep insights into adoption patterns to ensure your KPI’s are being met, or what to do about those that aren’t. With tyGraph you can quickly find key influencers, subject matter experts and trends to incorporate into your digital transformation and improvement strategy. We find tyGraph to not only be accurate and useful but actionable when it comes to their analytics.
https://twitter.com/tyGraphTweets/status/1415391887561789446
Why they inspire us
What is great about tyGraph is that they extract every bit of insight possible from the Microsoft 365 platform today and then they provide the intelligence to make many of those insights more actionable. When you think of all the audited activities in Microsoft 365 that is an incredible feat.
Tzunami
Simplify your data migration with the help of Tzunami's migration tooling. They have targeted solutions that enable you to automate and simplify migrating from confluence, eRoom, Documentum, LiveLink, DocuShare, eDocs, Hummingbird, HPE Content Manager, Lotus Notes, Atlassian Confluence, Egnyte, BIM 360 and many more.
Why they inspire us
Tzunami is a critical partner for so many migration scenarios where they are not only the most relevant choice, but they are often a choice that saves hundreds of hours of manual or custom migration work for us.
Valo
Valo focuses on a beautiful UI/UX experience with the ability to deploy quickly, since most of the staple features and experiences are baked into the solution. With a variety of solutions that are directly integrated into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, Valo's digital workplace products might be the perfect fit for your organization. From their main intranet solution, Valo Intranet, to their ideation solution, Valo Ideas, they are ready to strengthen your digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/valointranet/status/1415415869220421634
Why they inspire us
What is great about Valo is how effectively they have simplified some of the big Intranet challenges, and done so in a way that is accessible and extremely cost competitive. It's well built and they are constantly innovating where they see opportunities to further enhance the Microsoft digital workplace offering.
Continuing to inspire
Just like our partners, we continue to push the boundaries of what is deemed possible with Microsoft 365. We hope you have found this blog has opened your eyes to the incredible solutions outside of Microsoft that work with it to improve.
If you are looking for more information on the capabilities of Microsoft 365, we are sure you will find one of our free resources insightful and full with actionable information.
Children's Non-Profit Organization Sees Advantages of Digital...
| Industry | Non-Profit Social Services |
| Org Size | 100+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Teams SharePoint Power Platform |
Non-profit community organization funded by the Government, legally mandated to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
When the organization was looking to transform how they communicate and collaborate with staff and social workers, they partnered with 2toLead to ensure success. Their team used a legacy Intranet platform for sharing essential links and day-to-day relevant information. Another integral repository was the file server, which also needed to migrate to SharePoint Online. After an initial step in the right direction, moving from a Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft 365, they stayed committed to supporting their workforce during the transition.
As a non-profit organization, agility and efficiency are paramount to empower their team to reach as many people who need them as possible. The organization had the vision to provide the right tools, proper training and communication to support its staff. 2toLead was there to make it happen by leveraging their team of Microsoft 365 champions.
Establishing what the advantages of digital transformation mean for them
Our journey began in October 2019 by meeting with their IT and Administrative Services team. We focused on creating the foundational pieces and a new tool or channel that compelled users to visit, interact, and get information. Their staff looks at the Intranet as the source of critical information, raising the stakes of its importance.
At the time, Microsoft Teams was being piloted by their IT department to evaluate its capabilities and to identify how both Teams and SharePoint would complement each other. A question that's on the minds of many organizations today.
The building blocks of their Intranet
Our first release focused on providing the foundation for an Intranet that supported the central communication and collaboration functions of their team. As the organization had recently embraced the Microsoft 365 platform for email, leveraging SharePoint Online to build the foundation for their Intranet was a natural choice due to the strengths of a connected digital workplace.
With an agile set of workshops to cover our information architecture, navigation, and search capabilities, we confirmed our requirements for the new Intranet.
As part of our discussions, we reviewed the governance and life cycle planning aspects relevant to creating new communities using the platform. The use of wireframes and mockups were essential to iterate and confirm our requirements for visual impact faster.
Planning and executing the migration
With the foundation in place and the Intranet platform built, we rolled up our sleeves and dug into the file shares.
The team assessed the various file shares provided to staff for individual use (home drives), department level, and global use. The team used the gathered information to ensure the right documents were migrated.
Personal files: the team documented clear instructions for employees to move their data to OneDrive for Business.
More extensive data repositories: our migration consultants supported the team and migrated their information from their shared drives to SharePoint Online.
Adapting to the new normal with targeted training
During our journey, the Coronavirus pandemic brought additional challenges that compelled the non-profit to act fast and accelerate their plans for adoption, particularly for Microsoft Teams. Rolling out Microsoft Teams was vital to uphold their principles of service excellence and collaboration in the face of an unprecedented change to how work happens.
The Microsoft Teams rollout took priority, and from a technical perspective, it was simple to deploy. However, employees struggled to adapt to the new environment and needed additional support to remain productive. Internally, the staff received initial training and supporting resources, but they wanted to take it a step further.
Their team decided to provide more targeted training. With the help and information provided by them, 2toLead delivered a tailored training program focused on best practices and collaboration boosters. This empowered employees to use Microsoft 365 and Teams to their fullest potential. Additionally, given their recent transition to a new email and calendaring system, we emphasized tips and best practices for managing email, scheduling meetings, and organizing calendar events.
Taking the first steps towards business process automation
Accelerated by the new normal, and to facilitate critical business processes, we identified areas that needed automation. The Power Platform was a solid choice as the technology to underpin the efforts. The team had just begun their business transformation journey and needed a partner to walk the path and not only implement the critical business processes, but also acquire the knowledge internally by being part of the process.
To meet this goal, they partnered with 2toLead to automate a process for distributing vouchers to families in need.
The voucher administration process is a critical process that involved various departments, automation, and data sources within and outside the realm of Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
With the actors, their actions, and the flow of the system documented, the team joined forces and proceeded to build three Power Apps to meet the needs of the various actors, ranging from social workers, supervisors, administrators, and delivery drivers.
Along the way, our 2toLead consultants and their Administrative Services Team participated in the design and development sessions to create each app. This approach allowed for training the team as we developed the Power Apps and Power Automate Flows needed for each step of the process.
Leveraging data from on-premises data sources
A critical business need derived from the analysis was to read client data and present it using Power Apps. This data resided on-premises. Given the nature of its sensitivity, we needed a secure and efficient solution that allowed this data to be exposed to our Power App users while ensuring it would remain available at any time.
To meet this need, our architect team proposed a Hybrid Data Architecture model. This model leverages Common Data Service to store client information and update it regularly. The scenario called for using an on-premises data access gateway to connect to the SQL Server Instance on-premises. With the information now stored in a cloud entity, it was ready to be leveraged by Power Apps, or Power Automate flows that required it.
To complement the architecture, we also considered the use of Power BI to report on data from cloud sources such as our data entities and on-premises data residing in SQL Server.
What’s next for the organization?
With a solid foundation in place to communicate and collaborate with modern tools, and the resources to train new and existing employees, their team is well-positioned to invest further in making the operation more secure, efficient and adaptable to the needs of the organization.
The knowledge gained from building their first apps in the Power Platform will boost their confidence in the platform to continue optimizing and automating business processes and simplifying their reporting solutions to bring data and actions to the front lines. This experience, in turn, will contribute to supporting the organization in continuing to fulfill its mission to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
The power of a partner on your journey
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. Experiencing business transformation takes an intentional partnership with the business's knowledge and the expertise to optimize and implement technology in a way that meets your business outcomes. Our team is passionate and strives to work together to make the journey much more comfortable to walk along. Let us join your organization's journey towards digital transformation and business process optimization together.
Inside Our Microsoft 365 Communication And Collaboration...
When you begin looking for your first digital workplace solutions provider, or an update to an existing one, you should strongly consider the suite of applications you may already have at your disposal, Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 has been a cornerstone for users with office tools like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. What might be new to you, however, is that Microsoft also provides premium workplace communication and collaboration tools that help you effectively engage your employees.
Applications like Teams have allowed companies to connect their workforce, helping them advance office collaboration to new heights. Tools like SharePoint have allowed companies to create powerful corporate communications platforms that keep employees in the know and provide them with the content that they need daily. Extensions like Yammer have given corporate communicators a social network that is able to connect employees to each other, drive engagement, and share important knowledge across the org.
With Microsoft 365, digital workplaces are more than just a medium for communication and collaboration. They become an inclusive ecosystem of tools that help your employees work at their most productive levels.
What you can expect from our Microsoft 365 communication and collaboration eBook
This eBook comes from the pages of our Intranet Whitepaper and focuses in on the various advantages you have to gain when choosing Microsoft 365 as your Intranet or as your entire digital communication and collaboration platform.
We have divided these advantages into three categories:
- Digital Communication and Collaboration Applications
- Microsoft 365 Intranet and Digital Workplace Benefits
- Supporting Microsoft 365 Advantages
The following is a glimpse at what you can expect from each section.
Digital Communication and Collaboration Applications
In this section of the eBook, we highlight the 3 main communication and collaboration applications.
Microsoft Teams
Teams is a perfect example of Microsoft innovation at work. It combines video conferencing and collaboration tools into the ideal workstation. However, the innovations do not stop there. Microsoft Teams is also a powerful platform for your digital workplace. It continues to push the boundaries on communication and collaboration through apps, connectors, and customization capabilities.
If you have not already, it has never been a better time to join its 145 million daily active users in improving the way digital communication and collaboration happens.
https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1387141320519557120
Yammer
Since most of the buzz has been around Microsoft Teams, you might be wondering, "is Yammer still relevant?" Absolutely, and it has advantages you will want to leverage on your journey to a more social digital workplace. Yammer is a great place to have social interactions between colleagues without adding more clutter to your Teams channels. Instead, save those conversations for Yammer.
SharePoint
For over a decade companies have been relying on SharePoint for their Intranet. A strong indicator of its relevance is how many times the application has been the foundation for the Neilson Norman award, the equivalent of winning a Grammy in the Intranet space. We are proud to say that some of our colleagues have been awarded that very award for their work on a SharePoint Intranet.
While many have relied on it as the foundation for their Intranet, SharePoint has taken things up a few notches, enabling advanced capabilities for engaging with your employees. Their modern UI/UX is as simple to use as a Square Space website, and as easily configurable. If you are not already using SharePoint for your Intranet, you should know their users have doubled year-over-year, and it is for a good reason.
SharePoint is at the heart of Microsoft 365's digital workplace solutions and even the backbone for some. Its purpose includes improving the overall employee experience and engagement through effective communication and collaboration. Fortunately, SharePoint's purpose aligns with Microsoft's commitment to a better digital workplace, and the results have been outstanding.
Microsoft 365 Intranet and Digital Workplace Benefits
Each of the identified benefits has been proven, based on industry experience, to impact the business significantly and deliver considerable value. The benefits in this section of the eBook, identified as having a high estimated impact, should be prioritized, and a plan should be put into place to track and realize them.
While no particular digital workplace area is inherently more important than another, Microsoft and its 3rd party ecosystem do provide stronger benefits in some categories than others. We have organized the benefits, their impact, and alignment with key digital workplace categories:
Supporting Microsoft 365 Advantages
In the supporting advantages section of the eBook, we look at how innovation, cost savings and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem play a role in bettering your communication and collaboration efforts. Below are snippets of the sections.
Microsoft 365 Innovation
Microsoft continues to push boundaries across its product line, and the pandemic only accelerated this process. From SharePoint hitting over 200 million active users, to the Microsoft Teams hitting 145 million daily active users, organizations are primed to reap the benefits of Microsoft's countless innovations.
In the last two years alone, Microsoft has successfully launched 636 updates, is currently rolling out 237, and has 597 in the pipeline – at the time of release.
Infrastructure Cost Savings
Moving your business to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) can automatically reduce operating costs. Moving your business to Microsoft 365 as your SaaS provider can save your company money in many ways.
Millions of users are familiar with Microsoft technology and have used it at one point or another. This makes the learning curve a lot shorter when learning a new application and saves your company countless hours.
One of the most significant ways Microsoft 365 saves your organization money is by providing access to their entire suite of applications for a low cost, rather than having to purchase or pay for a variety of applications.
Ecosystem of Applications
The Microsoft 365 or Office 365 ecosystem of applications makes it easy to integrate your existing technology with the stack, switch between apps, create an integrated experience and bring your workplace on the go with mobile features.
You can liken the experience to one found as a consumer of Apple's ecosystem. The difference is that since Microsoft 365 is a business solution, it can also easily configure to fit your specific companies' look and feel and be built to fit your organization's needs.
There are an incredible number of other ways to measure and track the value Microsoft 365 provides with their Intranet software against your internal communication efforts. Users across the industry have exposure and have worked with SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, which can significantly reduce the change management costs or the need to re-learn digital skills. This benefit applies to content authors of your Intranet or contributors across your organization.
Microsoft 365, or SharePoint Online, is the platform used by many winners of the prestigious Nielsen Norman Intranet Award, including the awards our team has won over the years. In some years, 80% of the winners use SharePoint Intranets.
Is this what you have been looking for?
So, what are you waiting for? Whether you are looking to gain a strong understanding of the advantages available with Microsoft 365 or were you looking for a document that you can share, this eBook is for you!
Inside Our Guide To Improving Your Company's Intranet
Our Intranet and Digital Workplace guide is packed with important, relevant information for Internal Communications and IT professionals alike. It has been updated along with our other whitepapers to reflect what's happening and relevant for businesses today.
Why choose Microsoft 365 for my company's Intranet and Digital Workplace?
Many organizations are shifting towards a more connected, engaged, and innovative workforce. This is made possible by investing in and enabling your workforce with digital workplace technologies and a modern Intranet experience.
Some businesses have a plan to enable this through various enterprise technology investments and organizational initiatives. However, engaging the workforce can take years and may be seen as a future initiative for some organizations. When so many organizations are firefighting or reactively responding to employee needs, it can be difficult to provide employees with the kind of Intranet experience that enables that workforce to succeed.
Luckily, we have put together a whitepaper to help accelerate the engagement of your workforce. In this blog, you will get a glimpse into what you can expect from each section of the whitepaper.
In this blog, you will get a glimpse at:
- SharePoint as your Intranet and other key Microsoft 365 digital workplace applications
- Benefits of a Microsoft 365 intranet & digital workplace
- Best practices for building your Microsoft 365 intranet and digital workplace
SharePoint As Your Intranet And Other Key Microsoft 365 Digital Workplace applications
For over a decade, companies have been relying on SharePoint for their Intranet. While many already leverage SharePoint as the foundation for their Intranet, the platform has taken things up a few notches over the last years. A strong indicator of its relevance is how many times the application has been the foundation for the Neilson Norman award, the equivalent of winning a Grammy in the Intranet space. We are proud to say that our team has been behind a number of these award-winning intranets.
Their modern UI/UX is as simple to use a Squarespace website and as easily configurable. If you are not already using SharePoint for your Intranet, you should know its user base has doubled year-over-year, and it is for a good reason.
SharePoint continues to be at the heart of Microsoft 365's digital workplace solutions. Its core purpose of improving the overall employee experience and engagement through effective communication and collaboration is well aligned with Microsoft's commitment to a better digital workplace, and the results have been outstanding.
This section of the whitepaper looks at some potential uses for Microsoft's digital communication and collaboration trio; SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer.
Benefits Of A Microsoft 365 Intranet & Digital Workplace
For the benefits part of the whitepaper, we outline vital ones that can be realized through planning, investing, and implementing more SharePoint and Microsoft 365 capabilities within your organization's Digital Workplace.
To support and improve organizational understanding of the benefits Microsoft 365 will provide, we have identified over 40 key benefits that directly align with the fundamental digital workplace drivers of simplification, engagement, and productivity. Of these benefits, 70% have been proven, based on industry experience, to have a high, significant, and notable impact on the business and should deliver considerable business value. For an organization of greater size, this represents a potential positive impact of millions of dollars in cost savings, productivity gains, and simplification.
Best Practices For Building Your Microsoft 365 intranet And Digital Workplace
Microsoft 365 is easily malleable to your business requirements. While that presents a wave of opportunities, you will need help navigating the many options ahead. For that reason, we have included a long list of best practices in our whitepaper to consider across all aspects of your Intranet and digital workplace.
The following are a list of which best practices this whitepaper covers:
- Design: Intranet and Digital Workplace Best Practices
- Search: Intelligent & Available Where Users Work
- Getting the Most Out of News and Pages
- Planning Navigation
- Site, Communities and Information Architecture
- Site Provisioning & Managing Intranet Sites
- Multilingual Planning
- Navigation
- Microsoft 365 People Card & User Profile Experience
- The SharePoint Mobile App
- Personalization
- Social Integration
- Analytics and Key Intranet Metrics
- Technical Digital Workplace Best Practices
How we can make your Intranet a more personalized experience with Microsoft 365
One of the primary benefits of Microsoft 365 as a proven digital workplace technology is that it can help accelerate and enable (with relatively low cost) the kind of digital experiences that modern users need. Instead of engagement and innovation being future goals for the business, we have found the deployment and adoption of Microsoft 365 and a modern Intranet. Adopting them can shift the above timeline to months or quarters instead of taking entire years to accomplish the key technology changes and user behavior transformations needed.
The Intranet is at the epicenter of many organizations, where employees can get company news and information and search for people and content.
Together we can make the Intranet a more personalized experience, where users need it when users need it. Spanning on-premises and Microsoft 365, the mobile and intelligent Intranet brings together the productivity of SharePoint team sites, Microsoft Teams, the reach of Yammer, and the mission criticality of your most important business applications. All of this is done while being accessible from your desktop and your mobile phone. Lastly, Microsoft 365 powered Intranets are powered by the Microsoft Graph, so information finds your users instead of your users finding information.
Meeting modern workforce needs today is challenging. Keeping up with the demand and the needs of your future workforce is often seen as impossible.
An Intranet powered by Microsoft 365 or implemented in Microsoft 365 allows you to take advantage of the many related digital workplace enhancements Microsoft continually rolls out.
It's not just that you have a cloud-powered Intranet. It's that you have an Intranet that leverages, integrates, and uses as much of what Microsoft provides as possible so that your Intranet remains continually up to date and able to take advantage of the continued innovation Microsoft produces.
Tap into the true potential of a Microsoft 365 Intranet and Digital Workplace
The timing couldn't be better for your organization to begin the shift or further embrace Microsoft 365.
Not only is it possible to embrace Intranets on Microsoft 365, but with the guidance in our whitepaper, you will have a greater understanding. Learn how to improve it in less time and with less effort than almost any previously successful Intranet initiative you have undertaken.
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What is the Microsoft Power Platform?
Since its inception in November 2016, Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate have focused on the mandate to help organizations support business transformation. They provide a foundation that empowers the non-IT user to take their day to day activities and automate their business processes.
Let’s take a quick tour to meet the members of the Power Platform family.
Power Apps
Power Apps supports organizations to create responsive user interfaces to capture and present information in various devices and connect to data sources - obtaining or sending information.
There are 3 main ways to create custom apps with Power Apps:
- Canvas Apps – for apps where you want full control of the app design.
- Model-Driven Apps – component-based apps that focus on the business data models
- Power App Portals – external-facing websites that can surface business data.
Canvas Apps
With canvas apps, the world is your oyster! You have an empty canvas (pun intended!) to design your app just the way you want to. This may be a bit daunting at first, however, if you start from an existing data source (say, a SharePoint List for example) Power Apps is smart enough to give you a head start and create starter screens for you to browse the list, view or create/edit new items.
Model-Driven Apps
For model-driven apps, the focus is on the data itself and the business process around it. Instead of designing how the screen will look, you define the entities, business flows, forms, views, and/or dashboards around a specific business process. Model-Driven apps use the Common Data Service as the data repository for your entities.
Power Apps Portals
Power App Portals, also part of Power Apps, is one of the (old) new kids on the block that comes to provide a fresh new take on building external-facing portals for your organization.
Portals provide the means to create low/no-code responsive websites. These websites cant can be used with any major commercial (think Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or enterprise login provider (such as your own local credentials or work accounts such as your Office 365 account) and presents the user with a simple WYSIWYG interface to create static and dynamic web site pages based on information stored in the Common Data Service.
A few highlights of Power Apps Portals include:
- Building Blocks – Pages, templates, and components to build your Portal.
- New Page Experience to create great looking pages and a theming engine based on Bootstrap to quickly define a familiar look for your Portal.
- New Page Experience to create great looking pages and a theming engine based on Bootstrap to quickly define a familiar look for your Portal.
- Custom Domain URLs!
- List components to present or capture information stored in your CDS
- Form components to leverage model-driven forms (think of forms as part of a business process).
https://twitter.com/MSPowerApps/status/1315683651426844673
Power Automate
Power Automate on the other hand provides the ability to automate workflows that orchestrate business processes that gather data from disparate systems, make decisions and or transform the data into actionable tasks that can affect services in and out of the Office 365 or Microsoft ecosystem.
https://twitter.com/MSPowerAutomate/status/1296507293249482752
Based on actions, triggers, and conditions, you can build flows that run on a schedule or are triggered by an action (such as receiving an email, tweets from an account, a message from other systems, etc.). Once the flow is running, you can take action by reading the initial data from the trigger, manipulate it, make decisions based on it and act on other systems, for example, saving a new item into a SharePoint List, sending out an email, creating an approval task, etc.
Over 300 connectors are available for you to compose your flows in Power automate!
AI Builder
As you build new Power Apps or Power Automate flows there will be times where you want the power of artificial intelligence to support you in parts of the process. AI Builder provides capabilities to easily implement predictive AI capabilities that can speed up decision making based on historical data.
Currently, in preview, there are additional capabilities to explore around object detection (identifying and counting items on an image), forms processing (read and capture information in standardized forms for digitizing the content of the form) and text processing. These capabilities can support you to identify key trends and/or categorize content based on your business needs.
Power BI
Let’s not forget their older but also quite powerful cousin, Power BI. A suite of tools (desktop client, web client, and the Power BI service) released in July 2011 that have grown to be a key resource for building interactive reports and dashboard experiences.
https://twitter.com/MSPowerBI/status/1314641792055291905
Common Data Service
I mentioned earlier the Common Data Service, or CDS for short, is a cloud data repository that is primarily leveraged by the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of tools (and the Power Platform, of course ) which can also be used to create your own custom entities to store your company data.
CDS provides a robust security mechanism that can help you secure your data and provide appropriate access to each group that needs it. CDS is based on the Common Data Model schema and a standard set of entities that Microsoft has defined and is aligning with others such as Adobe and SAP as part of the Open Data Initiative. Another key benefit of the CDS is that it doesn’t need any infrastructure or administration, it is all managed by Microsoft.
On-premises Data Access Gateway
For those at home (see what I did there?), with the use of the Data Access Gateway, organizations can also connect to local services and information stores to effectively report on data sources (local SQL Server instances, SharePoint lists, and libraries, etc.) stored on-premises as well as create/update information in them in Power Apps or Power Automate.
For a while, that’s all we had… Until now!
Power Virtual Agents
The main premise of Power Virtual Agents is to support subject matter experts to create, manage and optimize chatbots by providing a no-code, easy to use interface that allows users to define topics where the bot can assist by providing accurate responses and even initiate a process by integrating with a Power Automate Flow.
The interface also supports quick testing of the bot and provides a dashboard with various key metrics to assess the engagement and effectiveness of the bot’s configured topics.
This is a game-changer, as previously it required a highly specialized team of IT, Data Scientists, Developers, and AI experts to have a baseline bot experience built and released.
Once you are done testing, you can easily publish your bot to a website (for external use), Microsoft Teams, or Facebook. With a few more additional steps, you can extend the reach to other canvases by using Azure Bot Service channels, allowing you to other services such as Skype, Kik, or Slack to name a few.
https://twitter.com/MSPowerVirtual/status/1314611628562960385
Great, so where to start?
Now that you are more familiar with the capabilities of the Power Platform, it will become easier to identify areas where these pieces can support your team to automate and make decisions day-to-day.
One key step towards your journey to business process improvement starts with understanding what the process actually looks like. Very few processes are accurately documented (if at all) and it is key to map out the business process, inputs, and outcomes before automation work should start. There are also various methodologies for mapping and optimizing business processes, one of which is the value stream mapping exercise, one of the tools of Lean methodology.
We’re here to help
Would you like to learn more? Have you identified a key business process that you can automate and transform the way you work? Reach out to us, we will be happy to support you on your journey towards business improvement.
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Microsoft 365 Cloud Security and Governance when External...
| Industry | Law |
| Org Size | 500 + |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Azur SharePoint Microsoft Teams OneDrive |
2toLead recently worked with one of Atlantic Canada's largest regional law firms. They reached out to us for guidance on using SharePoint Online to share information with external users, primarily their clients.
They were curious to explore the use of SharePoint Online for their clients and ensure they had easy and secure access while experiencing the platform. The team was particularly interested in the key areas that would help them secure access, ensure sensitive information was protected, and learn how to guarantee the configuration needed for Extranet sites was repeatable to keep compliant and maintain consistency.
The law firm was looking for a team that had the same philosophies around innovating and customer excellence. 2toLead was a great choice given our extensive experience building Intranet and Extranet portals as well as our breadth and depth of knowledge in the Microsoft 365 platform. The client's primary need was to move towards building an extranet service based on SharePoint Online that integrates with other systems for a more cohesive client experience. Join us in taking a look at the journey we took to better governed and more secure sharing.
TIP | If you are looking to improve governance, our eBook on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl can help!
Our journey toward better Microsoft 365 cloud security when external sharing begins
To determine the team's specific needs, we began our journey by holding a series of discovery sessions. These interactive discussions centered on governance, security, and compliance. The team was highly engaged and keen to learn what is possible in the platform, so we peeled back the various layers of Microsoft 365. We did this to ensure we had a common understanding of the platform's possibilities and gain user needs and insights that would drive our recommendations towards what specific areas needed to be defined and configured.
Peeling the external sharing onion
While the storefront for an extranet based on Office 365 is traditionally a SharePoint Extranet, we reviewed the different areas where the platform is malleable to configure a safe and secure collaboration experience. Along the way, we dove in to discuss Azure Active Directory, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, and OneDrive external sharing. We also looked at relevant policies and settings in Microsoft Teams to ensure proper coverage of the many ways one can collaborate and share with others.
The team was particularly interested in the platform's federation and single sign-on capabilities (as they were using a third-party solution to accomplish this goal. A more extensive and organization-specific analysis was done to identify the level of support and effort to migrate the SSO capability from the third-party platform to Azure Active Directory.
Add more personable moments, to highlight the relationship and good collaboration with the client.
- SSO piece, added interactive aspect to our discovery discussions
Thought leadership: showcase an example and a moment that marks the 2toLead difference.
- SSO piece, adding value beyond the basics
- Extranet/Intranet portals our core strength
Check about us page for client and map out values to journey where applicable.
- Added commitment to innovation and adding value to client with the firm intent to make their life’s easier.
A key differentiator for them as opposed to any other client.
- Their focus on innovation is clearly stated
Governance as the mainline for putting all the pieces together
In isolation, these capabilities allow us to configure the main pieces. However, we took special consideration in managing the container's lifecycle, site provisioning, and guest management.
Our findings raised important considerations for managing and automating these crucial processes to establish a repeatable and auditable process that balances business agility and security.
Keeping sensitive information safe and secure
Our compliance discussions highlighted the need for defining a set of policies and labeling that can support users on day one of using their extranet and prevents leakage of sensitive information. On the other hand, the need to define retention based on key document types, locations, automated or manual led to raising awareness and establishing an information governance strategy to support internal and external users as they adopt the new system.
On the security front, we also evaluated the need for defining a clear set of policies to ensure the right people have the proper access to data. Azure Active Directory played a vital role in these discussions. Capabilities such as Multi-Factor Authentication, Conditional Access, Terms of Use, and advanced group management provided the team with the right pieces to strengthen their security posture. These essential pieces would help provide peace of mind, even as they bring guest users into the Extranet environment.
Trust, but verifying
Another important consideration for security was the ability to audit user activity. The unified audit logging capabilities of the platform complement their existing investments on security.
These capabilities support the team by being alerted of critical risks associated with external sharing and other administration related tasks, ensuring prompt detection and mitigation should the need arise.
By performing access reviews using the Azure Active Directory capabilities, the team can ensure the right people have access to resources by periodically triggering reviews and providing the information to the owners of the content to attest to the access granted.
What is next?
While the journey continues for the law firm, the team now has a roadmap that sets out a clear path to follow based on business needs and prioritized next steps. Key milestones include defining their governance and information architecture needs towards automation of extranet site creation. In parallel, the team works with relevant parties to refine integration points with other systems to further enhance their clients' experience.
Let us tag along
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. If you are unsure about what you need for your digital transformation journey, reach out to us. Our strategy services can help you identify the key pieces to consider and set you up for success. Better yet, if you need a team of experts and passionate consultants to walk the path with you, let us tag along and bring the umbrella to protect you from rainy days.
Inside our SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl eBook
Recently, on top of updating all of our whitepapers, we released our first eBook! With applications like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, having the right sites, teams, and channels for the right job are easy thanks to the strides taken to facilitate the user experience for site and team creation by Microsoft. However, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams governance can be challenging for companies of all sizes and only increases as your company grows.
So what's the big deal? Well, unmanaged sprawl can present many problems for organizations. In this blog, we will review 8 of the most common sprawl issues.
The eight most common sprawl issues are:
- Ineffective Naming
- Owners & Ownership Missing
- Redundant Teams/Sites
- Data Loss Risks
- Loss of Control
- Slower Team/Site Start
- Navigation Challenges & Productivity Costs
- Training & Adoption Challenges
A bird's eye view of the issues
In a recent webinar with our partner Orchestry, our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, provided a quick bird's eye view of the eight common site sprawl issues. You can view this clip to get a small sample of the sprawl issues addressed in our eBook or watch the clips for each individual sprawl issue throughout the blog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lznJYKMTieA
Ineffective Naming
Ineffective naming is something many of us are familiar with when it comes to file and folder names, and it is an issue that has plagued digital workplaces since the very beginning. This naming challenge for folder names has made its way to the naming of SharePoint Sites, Microsoft Teams, and even Yammer communities. It can occur for various reasons, such as rushing to get the job done or employees using what makes sense to them, or because the user wanted to use a general term.
Since general terms are more widely understood, users lean to them in hopes that others will understand their purpose. However, as the number of teams and sites begins to grow, general terms are repeated in different environments or, in some cases, the same team/site with an additional word.
This results in issues like the focus or purpose of a workspace being unclear to both users and administrators.
Ineffective Naming Leads To...
Owners & Ownership Missing
Missing owners and ineffective ownership can cause chaos in your environment. Suppose a user needs access to a site or team and the owner is disengaged or not available. In that case, it can often lead to an inability for critical users to access the resources or collaboration workspaces they need.
This challenge doesn’t end when the workspace is created. It is an ongoing challenge and issue that must be managed over the life of a team or site. When a team or site owner is promoted, transitions to a new role, or departs the organization, the groups they have created, managed, or both might be left without the correct owner or may not have an active and engaged owner.
Another major challenge around ownership is that while a technical owner may exist, in many cases, they may not be the business sponsor or the person who needs to approve access, confirm compliance, or make decisions that might optimize the site/team.
Owners & Ownership Missing Leads To...
Redundant Teams/Sites
Redundant Teams and Sites are a common symptom of unmanaged sprawl. Redundancy occurs most often when a new team or site owner creates a workspace to solve a collaboration or sharing need but didn’t know another similar workspace existed (sometimes because they don’t have access or other times because they lack awareness/visibility).
They can also occur due to lack of control, even in well-managed environments, as an opportunity to optimize the information architecture and structure of workspaces. The goal is to improve how users work, such as what might occur naturally. The organization learns more about the best way to structure teams/sites when shifting from a model of per project teams/sites to eventually settling on a structure per client/product, etc.
Redundant Teams/Sites Lead To...
Data Loss Risks
Loss of data in the form of information or files is one of the more subtle but important issues that result from unmanaged sprawl. Because sites and teams are unmanaged, it also means that they often lack support, leadership, or classifications that enable effective security, information protection, and control.
For example, the lack of metadata or a centralized registry means an effective directory experience for end-users is unlikely. The lack of the two means users cannot find the sites/teams/spaces they should be sharing their assets in and often share content in the locations they know of and can quickly navigate to. In many circumstances, this may be the wrong location which often results in accidental oversharing. Alternatively, not knowing which workspace is the right one will result in users requesting access to more workspaces, often resulting in them having access to more teams than they need to, further increasing data loss risks.
Without managing sprawl, it is also unlikely that the organization is programmatically managing access reviews, ensuring classifications are accurate (what sites have confidential or higher risk information), that an owner who is managing security effectively exists, and that the organization is not providing proactive guidance to those Site/Team owners. All of these increase the risks of data loss.
Loss of Control
Losing control of your environment is a natural result of sprawl being unmanaged. In many cases, organizations that don’t proactively manage their digital workspaces, such as SharePoint Online sites, Microsoft Teams, or Yammer communities. Also, they do not provide sufficient engagement with business leads, resulting in more shadow IT consequences, which increases the total cost of ownership for IT.
Leaders and users in your organization know that they need to solve sharing, navigation, integration, and access challenges, so they use the knowledge at their disposal to tackle this independently. This results in more significant silos, more use of unsanctioned file-sharing or digital workspaces, higher user frustration, and perhaps most importantly, much more significant risks over time.
Data Loss Risks and Loss Of Control Often Leads To...
Slower Team/Site Start
One of the more significant issues that unmanaged sprawl causes is time wasted, which is money wasted. Suppose your digital workplace suffers from a slower digital workspace start. In that case, collaboration, shared understanding, and communication are reduced while the load on end-users and digital workspace owners is increased.
Slower Team/Site Starts Mean That...
Navigation Challenges & Productivity Costs
When navigation is broken, it is easy for a simple task to take exponentially longer than it needs to. Knowing the best place to share a specific document or where there might be reference material, and supportive experts/team members for some work you are performing can be a challenge.
This isn’t made better by gaps in the technology itself. While Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Viva, and Microsoft 365 all provide many ways to navigate, none of them provide a way to navigate based on your organizational context (filter all teams by department, or filter all sites by product, etc.).
Lack of navigational context combined with the fact that each workspace has differing navigation approaches (such as how Teams shows/hides groups and uses a search-like experience to find the right channel/team) can be extra taxing. As for SharePoint, it leans on recent/frequent sites and curated navigation.
In addition, poor navigation creates unnecessary inefficiencies and dependency on already overburdened resources to fill the navigation gaps with their time and effort directing requests, linking workspaces, and more due to unmanaged sprawl.
Navigation Challenges Lead To...
Training & Adoption Challenges
If your organization is having unmanaged sprawl issues, it means you are potentially missing one of the most powerful tools in your adoption and digital excellence toolbelt. The creation of a digital workspace and a digital workspace owner’s engagement is, arguably, the most significant things to align with your Microsoft 365 adoption strategy.
End users can learn through self-directed learning, adoption campaigns, and your continued proactive investments in adoption. The best ROI on adoption, though, stems not just from these things but the ability to provide it just in time, in context, and to the right people. The Microsoft Team, SharePoint site, and Yammer community owners in your org are the most important people to support proactively. By managing sprawl, you can target them at the right time to have the most significant impact (on creation and in the first period after creation).
Training & Adoption Challenges Lead To...
More details in our eBook
You can expect to dive deeper into how these issues impact the end-user and IT in the ebook. In addition, we provide some tips for resolving each issue reference in the eBook. If you think you need help with even one of these issues or want to prevent all of them, download our eBook!
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Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements
Microsoft Inspire 2021 was another incredible global event that brought us some interesting and exciting announcements from Microsoft. If you haven’t had a chance, be sure to review the Microsoft Inspire 2021 Book of News. As a Microsoft Gold Partner across many categories and an active leader in multiple advisory boards and preview programs, the announcements are often not new to our team. However, we wanted to take a moment to highlight a few key announcements that get us the most excited.
Our 3 Favorite Highlights From Microsoft Inspire
With all of the incredible Microsoft applications moving the meter on the advancement of Digital Workplaces everywhere, you might be wondering, what are the top three announcements/updates from this year’s global Microsoft partner event, Microsoft Inspire 2021.
After discussing with our all-star team of Microsoft MVPs and award winners, we are happy to bring our top 3 highlights from Inspire.
1. Richer & More Integrated Employee Experiences
Microsoft is now leading the charge in first-party integration with popular services and products. In addition, they are making it easier for customers and partners like ourselves to integrate these apps and services across the places users already work today, such as within Microsoft Teams, or surfaced contextually through experiences like Microsoft Viva Topics in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Office.
There are now 20+ partners who have rich integration throughout Microsoft Viva experiences.
Combine this with the existing 100+ Microsoft search connectors that make it easier to provide unified search and better search and graph-based experiences. (This 100+ connector number includes 9 first-party connectors from Microsoft for popular systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, File Shares, and more.)
2. More For Less
As a company that runs its business on Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, we are also extremely excited about the richer (and now free) integration that enables us to discuss, engage around, coordinate with and work on Dynamics activities in Microsoft Teams.
Earlier this month, Microsoft made some pretty big announcements on Power Platform pricing that help companies like ours, and hundreds of our customers do more with less as it relates to business applications and solutions. By reducing the licensing costs by half, more companies can enhance digital experiences and provide meaningful applications and automation through Power Apps and Power Automate.
Costs have shifted from $40 to $20 per user per month for Power Apps per users plans, and from $10 per user/app/month to $5 per user/app/month on October 1st. This price change effectively gives already invested customers money back from their budget for more apps and automation. Also, for many who are just getting started, the promotional pricing is a lower initial cost of ownership.
This also impacted Power Portals so if you haven’t looked at them – take another look as the solutions we have been implementing with customers here are often customer or B2B facing and prove that the Power Platform doesn’t just have to be used for internal applications/automation.
Other announcements provide more ways for vendors like us to provide greater discounts or ensure what you buy through the Microsoft marketplace experiences are closer to their costs by reducing their fees from the industry standard of 20% to 3%.
3. Sustainability Initiatives & Making Sustainability More Digitally Accessible
It can be easy to underestimate just how challenging it is for a company to respond and support the important work needed to meet sustainability goals and respond to one of the most urgent crises facing out planet. However, Microsoft certainly made it easier for organizations like ours and many of our customers by releasing a new “Cloud for Sustainability” later this year.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability enables any organization to record, report, reduce, and replace their emissions more easily and effectively as they relate to IT carbon emissions, which is a great forward step. It will be much harder for organizations to avoid tackling, measuring, and working on sustainability if doing so becomes more accessible and easier to manage.
Expanding your knowledge for FREE
If you are looking for more insights into previous or future announcements, keep in mind that not only are we a Microsoft Gold Partner, but our team is comprised of Microsoft MVPs, and board members. We always have time available to share knowledge, insights, and context on Microsoft 365 and Azure that can help organizations like yourselves be more successful.
Or maybe you looking to learn more about the incredible Digital Workplace offerings from Microsoft 365 or how best to implement them? Dive into our library of resources.
14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Microsoft Inspire is a time of learning, discovery, and new and old partnerships. In the spirit of the event, we have put together a tribute to solution partners that inspire us to push the envelope with Microsoft 365 digital workplaces.
If you are looking for the top 3 highlights of the event, take a look at our blog titled "Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements" for the details.
Microsoft has Inspired 400K+ Services & Solution Companies, Globally
This partner portfolio is incredibly diverse, and it can be challenging to navigate. We have evaluated and collaborated with hundreds of active Microsoft 365 product companies to ensure our customers get the right fit from the best and brightest Microsoft partners. If you are an incredible organization and we haven’t worked with you as a partner, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Our own leadership team has managed and led dozens of Microsoft Services partners, and when we created 2toLead, we didn’t want to establish another Microsoft consultancy. We wanted to establish an organization that customers, partners, and communities know will do the right thing, go the extra mile, and have been fortunate enough to be called a generous consulting company. If you are looking to join our growing team or know exceptional people, please don’t hesitate to reach out on our LinkedIn postings we have up, as we are always hiring.
Microsoft Is Changing & So Are All Of Us
Microsoft and Microsoft 365 have been pushing the evolution of digital business practices since both of their inceptions. Microsoft 365 has grown a lot since the early years, and it only continues to advance as Teams, and SharePoint active daily users are at all-time highs, with no signs of slowing down.
There are entirely new challenges and opportunities in the Microsoft Power Platform space, with Azure, and in the growing ways, AI and cloud insights provide new ways to work and create business solutions.
It is an incredible time to be a Microsoft partner, and we are thrilled at the rate of innovation, not only because of the opportunities this creates for our customers and partners but also because it helps us re-invent, re-align, and always learn new things.
The 14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Not only has Microsoft done incredible things on its own, but it is also tethered to an incredible partner ecosystem of services and solutions. They have helped Microsoft push the envelope and/or helped to fill in some gaps that a company focusing on the many can’t always afford.
This blog will identify the partners that inspire us, why they inspire us and a brief description of what they do.
These partners include:
- AvePoint
- BA Insights
- CardioLog
- Layer2
- LiveTiles
- Orchestry
- Panagenda
- Powell
- Quest
- Rencore
- ShareGate
- tyGraph
- Tzunami
- Valo
For a little more on each partner, visit our partner page or contact us to discover if they are right for your needs.
AvePoint
AvePoint offers an incredible breadth of products and services that make it easier, and speedier, to accomplish tasks whether your organization is all in with the cloud or in a Hybrid state. These products/services include Cloud Archiving, Cloud Backup, Citizen Services, File Share navigation (from in M365), GroupHub, Cloud Insights, Cloud Management, MyHub, Cloud Governance, Policies & Insights, Cloud Records, Administrator, Archiver, Backup & Restore, Compliance Guardian Platform, Connector, Content Manager, Data Validation, Classification & Protection, Deployment Manager, Discovery Tooling, Enterprise Risk Management, File Share Archiver, Cloud & SharePoint Migration, Governance Automation, Meetings, High Availability, Office Connect, Perimeter, Records, Replicator, Report Center and Storage Manager.
https://twitter.com/AvePoint/status/1415657662226878476
Why they inspire us
AvePoint has incredible breadth in it’s offerings. It is always relevant in today’s Microsoft 365 enterprise strategy discussions. Whether it’s leveraging… MyHub for managing Microsoft 365 workspaces and creating new ones… we are always happy when we see that our customers have invested in AvePoint.
BA Insights
Connect knowledge with seekers, reward questions with results, stop sifting and start asking. BA Insight provides internet-like enterprise search for organizations that want their knowledge to be askable. They do this by providing personalized, intelligent, connected (over 80 enterprise systems), relevant (automated and intelligent meta tagging) and in-app search from anywhere.
https://twitter.com/BAinsight/status/1413209546248556545
Why they inspire us
The power of a modern, intelligent and connected search has often been out of reach for many organizations due to cost, complexity and feasibility. This has fundamentally changed with Microsoft Search, search improvements and incredible ecosystem advances like those led by BA Insight who has created smart search solutions such as connectors for 80+ enterprise systems.
CardioLog
CardioLog Analytics enables organizations to provide in-depth Office 365 analytics, insights, trends, adoption productivity and usage reports, but more importantly makes those analytics easier to engage, enhance and enforce. As an example CardioLog enables you to target users based on behaviour and enforce certain security policies that improve data safeguarding.
Why they inspire us
The way CardioLog approaches adoption is aligned perfectly with the way we encourage organizations to leverage adoption campaigns and a just in time and in place communication approach. Between the way they use analytics with built in tooling for these adoption and communication tactics as well as enforcement is something that differentiates them from some of the other analytic vendors in the marketplace and is one of the big reasons we love working with them.
Layer2
Layer2 leading solutions is the market-leading provider of data integration and document synchronization solutions for the Microsoft Cloud, focusing on Office 365, SharePoint, and Azure. More than 2.500 companies worldwide and regional partners trust in Layer2 products to keep data and files in sync between 100+ systems and apps in the cloud and on-premises.
Why they inspire us
It is almost unbelievable that a synchronization approach to integration like what Layer2 makes easier to accomplish, can provide literally millions of dollars of value in only a few months. From integrating data sources into extranet sites like supplier portals to avoiding complex integration risks and licensing impacts this is one technology you don’t want to miss out on.
LiveTiles
Organizations everywhere look to LiveTiles to provide them with top tier solutions that elevate their SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environments, innovating beyond them, no matter the size of the organization. With some of the world's most recognizable brands using their product, we would love to show you how their revolutionary digital workplace solutions offer broad and deep end-to-end capability to meet the needs of a modern digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/livetiles/status/1415642564779204610
Why they inspire us
Just look at a leading Digital Workplace vendor like LiveTiles. They have explored and assessed the gaps in Microsoft's Intranet platform and provided solutions that build on what Microsoft does well, while challenging and providing intelligently architected solutions where Microsoft falls short. They don't only do that, but they do it in such a way that it makes it easy for customers or companies like ours to further extend and enhance it easily.
Orchestry
Orchestry is a balanced platform composed of adoption tools, engaging templates, controlled provisioning, and empowering self-service to drive usage and adoption success in Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. Orchestry has pioneered a comprehensive governance, adoption and enablement tool for Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, that delivers control while empowering greater access to all users. They are a fairly new company but have years of knowledge in the companies founders that have been poured back into the solution.
https://twitter.com/OrchestrySoft/status/1414723753779597316
Why they inspire us
What’s incredible is how clever Orchestry’s approach is on making the provisioning or creation process of new Teams and Sites not only easier with excellent templating/automation, but in making the challenge of when to use what easier as well. When you combine this with the ongoing challenge on managing the lifecycle and navigation of these spaces… it’s clear that the Orchestry approach really does make a difference.
Panagenda
Panagenda’s OfficeExpert is a modular solution that significantly improves productivity, end user experience and job satisfaction using unrivaled Office 365 performance measurement and monitoring technology. The insight it can provide can greatly help large scale global customers better manage and understand how Microsoft 365 is being used.
https://twitter.com/panagenda/status/1405523122707734528
Why they inspire us
Panagenda understands large global enterprise customer challenges when it comes to Microsoft 365 and for licensing management they have always been easy to recommend, but the signals, monitoring and analytics in teams… especially when comparing against Zoom, Webex or other products/services in your own organization is incredibly valuable.
Powell
Powell Intranet and Teams offers compelling capabilities whether you are looking for newsroom publishing, events management, social communities, knowledge centers, search experiences, employee directories, analytics, better templating, improved navigation, better employee services or better corporate branding. IT departments everywhere are tasked with managing and maintaining their corporate digital workplace. The internal communications, rightfully, wants something enticing and easy-to-use but sometimes those solutions come at a cost. With Powell's intranet solution, IT and internal communications can both get exactly what they want.
https://twitter.com/PowellSoftware/status/1394943545535078406
Why they inspire us
Powell Manager and the Powell approach leans into the gap of effective design and templating that Microsoft hasn't filled by providing an extensible and intuitive experience that automates or simplifies so many things our customers and we as consultants must do to achieve a highly successful digital workplace.
Quest
Quest provides enterprise scale and well-rounded cloud solutions that are ready to take you from platform migration to cloud deployments quickly and effectively. Security and governance are other areas that their solution shines. The company has been around since 1987 and have packed those years of IT knowledge into their latest offerings that cover the breadth of Microsoft 365 services and applications.
https://twitter.com/Quest/status/1415673775077543944
Why they inspire us
Quest has a long history of providing solutions our customers need and their acquisition of Metalogix has further grown their relevant and useful portfolio of Microsoft 365 solutions for us. When it comes to Lotus Notes and a variety of other migration scenarios Quest is always at the top of our customers, and our own list as the vendor to engage for the right end-to-end approach.
Rencore
Rencore is an incredible company that provides governance automation solutions that help you stay in control of Microsoft 365. You can easily identify anomalies and trends that might affect your governance plan for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Azure, and Power Platform and automate the necessary next steps.
https://twitter.com/Rencore/status/1415317351101239304
Why they inspire us
Rencore understands the technical complexity of the Microsoft 365 platform. We love Rencore Code (SPCAF) and have used it for years helping our customers analyze and assure code quality when building on SharePoint, Office 365 and Teams. Now we loving the incredible potential of Rencore Governance as it’s focus on the whole of the M365 platform is hard not to love… There aren’t many who offer Power Platform governance improvement and automation alongside Teams and SharePoint while also considering Microsoft Stream, Dynamics and more.
ShareGate
Renown for providing an easy to use tool that has and continues to enable thousands of successful migrations for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. ShareGate is a premier solution in the migration space and can simplify and aid in the complex migration many systems to your Microsoft 365 digital workplace. They are truly the simplest way for IT to succeed with a faster transition to the Microsoft cloud.
Also, monitor your tenant and highlight ways to make it healthier based on the policies you set. Then automate and action those improvements. With many years in the industry, ShareGate, being migration specialists, saw what was happening to digital workplaces after everything had been migrated and set out to solve the issue of management and governance that comes with growth. That is when ShareGate Apricot was born, an IT first solution designed to ensure your organization can rest easy when it comes to some of the most common (and challenging) governance scenarios for Microsoft Teams.
https://twitter.com/sharegatetools/status/1394310410732511233
Why they inspire us
What’s great about ShareGate is that even after so many years of enhancements, new capabilities, and improvements it still is so darn simple to use. For so many organizations they just need an easy to learn, understand and well supported solution for migration and some of the most common management/optimization activities that you need to do and it’s here that ShareGate delivers.
tyGraph
tyGraph uses deep insights into adoption patterns to ensure your KPI’s are being met, or what to do about those that aren’t. With tyGraph you can quickly find key influencers, subject matter experts and trends to incorporate into your digital transformation and improvement strategy. We find tyGraph to not only be accurate and useful but actionable when it comes to their analytics.
https://twitter.com/tyGraphTweets/status/1415391887561789446
Why they inspire us
What is great about tyGraph is that they extract every bit of insight possible from the Microsoft 365 platform today and then they provide the intelligence to make many of those insights more actionable. When you think of all the audited activities in Microsoft 365 that is an incredible feat.
Tzunami
Simplify your data migration with the help of Tzunami's migration tooling. They have targeted solutions that enable you to automate and simplify migrating from confluence, eRoom, Documentum, LiveLink, DocuShare, eDocs, Hummingbird, HPE Content Manager, Lotus Notes, Atlassian Confluence, Egnyte, BIM 360 and many more.
Why they inspire us
Tzunami is a critical partner for so many migration scenarios where they are not only the most relevant choice, but they are often a choice that saves hundreds of hours of manual or custom migration work for us.
Valo
Valo focuses on a beautiful UI/UX experience with the ability to deploy quickly, since most of the staple features and experiences are baked into the solution. With a variety of solutions that are directly integrated into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, Valo's digital workplace products might be the perfect fit for your organization. From their main intranet solution, Valo Intranet, to their ideation solution, Valo Ideas, they are ready to strengthen your digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/valointranet/status/1415415869220421634
Why they inspire us
What is great about Valo is how effectively they have simplified some of the big Intranet challenges, and done so in a way that is accessible and extremely cost competitive. It's well built and they are constantly innovating where they see opportunities to further enhance the Microsoft digital workplace offering.
Continuing to inspire
Just like our partners, we continue to push the boundaries of what is deemed possible with Microsoft 365. We hope you have found this blog has opened your eyes to the incredible solutions outside of Microsoft that work with it to improve.
If you are looking for more information on the capabilities of Microsoft 365, we are sure you will find one of our free resources insightful and full with actionable information.
Virtual Employee Onboarding Checklists for Managers
Great first impressions go a long way, and as an employee starting at a new company, it is vital to make yours count. That being said, doesn't the same apply to organizations doing the hiring? Of course! That's why to help organizations put their best foot forward from the start, we have put together an employee onboarding checklist for managers.
You can take it as-is, but we also provide light nods to Microsoft 365 solutions that can help and a suggested method that leans into Microsoft 365 technologies. With this onboarding checklist template, you'll be sure to improve employee retention and employee performance, especially in the long term.
It is also imperative to tailor the employee onboarding process for hybrid and remote workers alike, with the increase in both categories. However, this virtual employee onboarding checklist is a great place to start. Wondering about the suggested method we mentioned? Read until the end to learn what it is.
Checklist for the First 3 Stages of Virtual Employee Onboarding
It is essential to show your new hire the right tools and processes and understand what your company culture is all about, which can also be implemented in the hiring phase. In this employee onboarding checklist, we will help with all of the above and connect some of the dots on how Microsoft 365 can help. After reviewing the checklist, we have added our suggested approach to drive better results.
Inform the rest of the company about the new hire
- Ask yourself what the best solution gets the most engagement from your employees and lean on it, or a couple, to deliver the message. With Microsoft 365, you can leverage your intranet through SharePoint or Teams, post to a community in Yammer or channels in Teams, or send an email to your organization through Outlook.
TIP | While a group or community dedicated to new hires might seem logical for any sized organization, it may get lost among your other Teams and channel alerts. So, while larger organization can get away with, as more employees will be hired more regularly, smaller organizations may be better off with a general channel or community.
Create a structured itinerary for the first couple of weeks.
- Organize time for the employee to familiarize themselves with Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and your Intranet (SharePoint).
- Make sure to include Human Resources and admin meetings and time to fill the related forms.
- Schedule it all through Outlook, and it will automatically appear in their Microsoft Teams calendar too.
- You may also use Planner to structure out tasks they need to accomplish. There you can assign dates, add essential bits of information and communicate directly on a task.
Contact the new hire to communicate the working from home standard and virtual onboarding specifics.
- Send them an email with essential links, like your employee handbook and useful links on your website.
- Create reusable OneNote tabs for onboarding essentials according to their department/team.
- Examples of good content to use in your OneNote are links to webinars stored in Microsoft Stream, SharePoint, OneDrive, relevant documents, and common questions.
- Finally, reiterate that the team looks forward to their arrival.
Prepare for their first day.
- Make sure that they have either received their technology or that it is ready for pick up. You can automate the process with Power Automate to let you know that a new account was created by IT in your department and other small tricks to avoid needing to check in as frequently.
- Assign the new hire an onboarding buddy that isn’t you for the first few weeks or months. This will allow them to ask questions that might be too shy to ask their manager and get familiar with the rest of the team.
Welcome and overview meeting in Microsoft Teams
- Check out our “Tips for the perfect remote meeting in Microsoft Teams” infographic and feel free to share it with the new hire and your organization.
- Suggested meetings include Team introduction meeting, virtual team lunch, introduce them to their onboarding buddy that is not you, digital workplace tour (following up on the links you sent them and/or are in the OneNote you created), software tour and function check, and any others that are more specific to your organization.
Clearly communicate how their performance will be reviewed.
TIP | Make sure you allow them room to communicate their perspective and ask questions.
Outline how they can report feedback about team members or even you.
- This will help them feel like they can freely communicate their concerns, should they need to.
One of the meetings within the first two weeks should be to set their goals and expectations.
- Share critical information about their role and responsibility.
- Go through and documents performance goals with them.
TIP | Create reasonable goals for their first month or so, as getting used to a new environment, virtual or not, takes time.
Streamlining the process with onboarding sites
We have made light nods and suggestions throughout this blog to help you through the checklist with Microsoft 365. However, there is a more effective way to streamline the process, and if your organization is going through continuous growth, it's an ideal time to leverage it. Below are two reasons with examples of why an onboarding site can create a more effective onboarding process.
A consolidated experience
Imagine the impact of sending your new hire a single link to a site that is focused on their onboarding and adoption of your culture and environment; instead of an email with links to various locations and files, such as your intranet and employee manual. By doing this, you can keep the attention of your new hire focused on the onboarding process.
Tailoring the experience
When we say you will keep your employee-focused, it isn't just because you have provided a dedicated link, it's that the entire environment is dedicated to the process. The following points outline a couple of ways you can keep your new hire focused, efficient, and engaged with the rest of the organization in a directed way.
Navigating to successful onboarding
Create a path that is clearly represented in the menu.
Same journey, different delivery
For employees who are born to browse, recreate the experience in the page layout. The following are a few examples of the onboarding site sections.
- Start you onboarding journey
- Wandering a bit, why not reintroduce them to your company and leadership?
- Push them to engage with the rest of the organization. For example, connecting with their assigned mentor or onboarding buddy.
- Have they set up their personal information? Why not make sure they do and make HR happy all-in-one?
- Does the new hire have some extra time between meetings? Consuming relevant information is never a bad idea!
- Pepper in some more company engagement opportunities like your internal and external social channels.
- Finally, make sure even the greatest born browser finds their way back on track in their scheduled virtual employee onboarding journey.
Accelerating the onboarding process
Now that you have your checklist ready, are you looking for ways to accelerate the onboarding experience? Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, will be teaming up with LiveTiles for a webinar on accelerating employee onboarding and your hybrid workplace with Microsoft 365!
Microsoft 365 Adoption Whitepaper Updated
More and more companies are adopting newer technology solutions in the workplace. The reason is simple, these technologies are either required to stay competitive or will push your business to the next level of success. You need to embrace these new technologies, and more importantly, you need to secure your investment and the intended outcome of the solution.
Driving adoption is crucial to employee effectiveness, efficiency, and business costs. Luckily, we have just what you need to heighten the chances of Microsoft 365 adoption. We're happy to announce we just updated our Microsoft Adoption whitepaper, and it is full of everything you need to know to increase Microsoft 365 adoption in your organization.
This whitepaper contains information on:
- Our approach to Microsoft 365 success planning
- Driving technology adoption
- Adoption campaigns
- Adoption activities that help
- Adoption activity checklists
The purpose of this blog is to give you a glimpse at what to expect from the different sections of our 70+ page whitepaper, and we are sure you will see something that resonates with you and your situation.
Our Approach To Microsoft 365 Success Planning
2toLead uses an adoption framework to plan Microsoft 365 success. We have found that by investing in key areas, a customer can significantly improve Microsoft 365 adoption and its impact. What follows is a simple diagram that helps communicate the areas we encourage customers to invest in.
Investment focus areas that can be used to improve technology adoption.
Technology governance and adoption is a vast subject that is potentially time-consuming for any organization to tackle. Our approach is to present and educate each customer on best practices in the context of their organization. The intent is to provide the guidance and tools you need to successfully deliver and implement a practical and achievable Microsoft 365 strategy.
To ensure greater success with Microsoft 365, we recommend every organization follow a few key steps to improve adoption strategy and planning. Find them by downloading our whitepaper.
Driving technology adoption
Getting more people to use technology is important, but getting people to use more of the technology is just as important, if not more important, than getting them to use it. Successful adoption isn't measured in infrequent and basic use of technology; it's measured in impact and maximizing the benefits the technology provides on an ongoing basis.
*Successful adoption is about more than just usage.
To help drive successful adoption, you need to drive user awareness and guide user understanding. In this section of our whitepaper, you will find suggestions to improve both awareness and guidance through the use of carefully crafted adoption campaigns, tips, contests, challenges, and activities.
Adoption Campaigns
When we surveyed and interviewed hundreds of organizations, we learned that combining adoption activities in a campaign with a clear start, end, and measurements dramatically increase the impact of those adoption activities. What's more, connecting and tying activities together increases the chances of users retaining information, learning, and participation levels.
This approach of time boxing and coordinating activities can work as a targeted campaign for a new set of Microsoft 365 capabilities, like the roll-out of SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or Exchange. It can also be a great way to emphasize new capabilities that come with each major improvement in Microsoft 365.
Download our whitepaper for a detailed look at adoption campaigns.
Additional Adoption Activities
For us to realize the value we want, we have to get our users to adopt the new technology and change the way they work. The activities shared in this section were discovered based on experience, extensive research, assessments, and work done with Microsoft and analyst agencies.
In our whitepaper, we provide a wide variety of adoption activities for the following:
- Leadership Activities: Making Microsoft 365 Successful
- Awareness Activities: Helping people use Microsoft 365
- Education Activities: Helping people understand the value of Microsoft 365
The activities also translate to on-premises server technology like SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016, and more. Here is an adoption activity example that can provide a small taste of what you can expect from the activities, including suggested timing and effort level.
Adoption Activities Checklist
We included adoption activity checklists that you can use to track which activities you have completed or which ones you plan on completing as you improve adoption within your enterprise. The activities are listed according to the category, along with their level of effort (LOE).
Here are a couple adoption pre-launch checklist examples for leadership and awareness that correspond to the activities described in the previous section.
Adopt better strategies with our help
Your modern workplace is waiting to be used to its fullest potential and is ready to help guide your business to tremendous success by ensuring your workforce is informed, happy and efficient.
You have rolled out Microsoft 365, but you will need to leverage and adopt the solutions to gain all its benefits. Download our whitepaper to unlock a better digital workplace and more productive workforce.
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Migrate to SharePoint Online and 2019 | Whitepaper Update
With Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, Microsoft provides a modern platform that allows organizations to build their own tailored Digital Workplace. The applications and the rich set of features that Microsoft 365 provides can be leveraged together to build an environment customized to organizations’ needs and requirements, their corporate entities, and their staff.
As many new and exciting features are not available with older versions of SharePoint, many organizations migrate from their old environment to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online. Those who want or need to host SharePoint within their own hosted environment can migrate to SharePoint 2019.
Regardless of the designated target environment, migrating an existing environment is never an easy endeavor and requires a lot of planning and preparation. Based on our staff’s long-time experience with SharePoint migrations for various organizations, we know that thorough and comprehensive planning is a crucial step to success. This Whitepaper provides guidance and best practices regarding migrations from previous versions of SharePoint to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019 as well.
How will it help you migrate to SharePoint?
This whitepaper is over 50+ pages long and looks extensively at migrating to SharePoint Online and 2019. The following are the topics discussed in the whitepaper.
- Business Drivers for Migration
- Key Considerations
- Planning and Strategizing for Your Migration
- Risks to the Success of Your Migration
- Key Takeaways
Read more about each section topic below or dive into the entire whitepaper by clicking on the image.
Business drivers for migration
Everyone upgrades eventually (or they move away from the platform), so we think it's always good to talk about why businesses are accelerating their upgrades or where (in terms of workload) they are considering an 'early' upgrade/migration for SharePoint.
So why do people upgrade or migrate? It's worth noting that there are internal and external pressures on IT to upgrade their technology. In this section of the whitepaper, we look at the internal and external factors as well as creating a better user experience, improving business process support and collaboration support, reducing hardware maintenance costs, and improving security.
Key considerations
Once the planning is done and plans have been verified multiple times, your organization will proceed with migration activities and migration execution. Migrating content from one environment to another environment isn't as easy as migrating files from one folder to another folder.
When planning to migrate data in a professional environment, we need to think about how to best migrate data with the least disruption to the business. The section of the whitepaper provides an overview of the most common migration considerations.
Planning and strategizing for your migration
The upgrade supported process is often not used to avoid paying for additional hardware configuration and setup to hop from older versions of SharePoint Server to newer ones (as each supports an upgrade from the last).
For example, a simple diagram depicting the typical flow of most SharePoint Online migrations follows.
In this section of the whitepaper, we detail all of the different phases seen in the illustration above.
Risks to the success of your migration
Several factors can impact the perceived success of the content migration effort by the project team and external stakeholders.
- Technical Changes vs. Organizational Changes
- General Expectations
- When To Review Content
- Picking The Right Approach & Tooling
- Ensure You Have Broken Down Enough
- Validate The Target Readiness
- Test Migrations & Get A Ranged Duration Estimate
- Migration Sign Off
We go into detail on the listed risks in our SharePoint Migration Whitepaper.
Key takeaways from reading our whitepaper
Successful migrations leverage the best practices listed in this white paper - before, during, and after - the migration process. As with any migration, you need to do proper planning and analysis of the legacy system and how it will map to SharePoint. You need to prepare the target environment for the new content and usage. You need to ensure the migration results in as little user disruption as possible. Finally, you need to ensure that the new SharePoint architecture ensures a better experience today and in the future.
- Invest in better understanding your content and how it's used today.
- Invest in more migration planning for a more successful migration.
- Invest in greater amounts on post-migration activities like support, adoption, and change management.
- Invest in greater expertise by not doing this work alone or without an expert. Find a friend or partner who has done it before and knows what to expect.
It isn't always easy, and that's why we tried our best to share some guidance that might help you. Download our Whitepaper to take advantages of our combined experience!
Migrating to SharePoint just got simpler
Need a little extra help? Whether your organization is looking for quick or incremental migration project to Online or the latest version of SharePoint On-Premises, our organization is ready to help with a strong history of successful migrations. It was and is very typical in the process of the over 100+ intranets we have implemented.
We are ready and happy to support your migration efforts with our Microsoft MVPs and extensive knowledge and experience with migrating to SharePoint sites, files and folders from various document libraries and platforms.
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Children's Non-Profit Organization Sees Advantages of Digital...
| Industry | Non-Profit Social Services |
| Org Size | 100+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Teams SharePoint Power Platform |
Non-profit community organization funded by the Government, legally mandated to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
When the organization was looking to transform how they communicate and collaborate with staff and social workers, they partnered with 2toLead to ensure success. Their team used a legacy Intranet platform for sharing essential links and day-to-day relevant information. Another integral repository was the file server, which also needed to migrate to SharePoint Online. After an initial step in the right direction, moving from a Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft 365, they stayed committed to supporting their workforce during the transition.
As a non-profit organization, agility and efficiency are paramount to empower their team to reach as many people who need them as possible. The organization had the vision to provide the right tools, proper training and communication to support its staff. 2toLead was there to make it happen by leveraging their team of Microsoft 365 champions.
Establishing what the advantages of digital transformation mean for them
Our journey began in October 2019 by meeting with their IT and Administrative Services team. We focused on creating the foundational pieces and a new tool or channel that compelled users to visit, interact, and get information. Their staff looks at the Intranet as the source of critical information, raising the stakes of its importance.
At the time, Microsoft Teams was being piloted by their IT department to evaluate its capabilities and to identify how both Teams and SharePoint would complement each other. A question that's on the minds of many organizations today.
The building blocks of their Intranet
Our first release focused on providing the foundation for an Intranet that supported the central communication and collaboration functions of their team. As the organization had recently embraced the Microsoft 365 platform for email, leveraging SharePoint Online to build the foundation for their Intranet was a natural choice due to the strengths of a connected digital workplace.
With an agile set of workshops to cover our information architecture, navigation, and search capabilities, we confirmed our requirements for the new Intranet.
As part of our discussions, we reviewed the governance and life cycle planning aspects relevant to creating new communities using the platform. The use of wireframes and mockups were essential to iterate and confirm our requirements for visual impact faster.
Planning and executing the migration
With the foundation in place and the Intranet platform built, we rolled up our sleeves and dug into the file shares.
The team assessed the various file shares provided to staff for individual use (home drives), department level, and global use. The team used the gathered information to ensure the right documents were migrated.
Personal files: the team documented clear instructions for employees to move their data to OneDrive for Business.
More extensive data repositories: our migration consultants supported the team and migrated their information from their shared drives to SharePoint Online.
Adapting to the new normal with targeted training
During our journey, the Coronavirus pandemic brought additional challenges that compelled the non-profit to act fast and accelerate their plans for adoption, particularly for Microsoft Teams. Rolling out Microsoft Teams was vital to uphold their principles of service excellence and collaboration in the face of an unprecedented change to how work happens.
The Microsoft Teams rollout took priority, and from a technical perspective, it was simple to deploy. However, employees struggled to adapt to the new environment and needed additional support to remain productive. Internally, the staff received initial training and supporting resources, but they wanted to take it a step further.
Their team decided to provide more targeted training. With the help and information provided by them, 2toLead delivered a tailored training program focused on best practices and collaboration boosters. This empowered employees to use Microsoft 365 and Teams to their fullest potential. Additionally, given their recent transition to a new email and calendaring system, we emphasized tips and best practices for managing email, scheduling meetings, and organizing calendar events.
Taking the first steps towards business process automation
Accelerated by the new normal, and to facilitate critical business processes, we identified areas that needed automation. The Power Platform was a solid choice as the technology to underpin the efforts. The team had just begun their business transformation journey and needed a partner to walk the path and not only implement the critical business processes, but also acquire the knowledge internally by being part of the process.
To meet this goal, they partnered with 2toLead to automate a process for distributing vouchers to families in need.
The voucher administration process is a critical process that involved various departments, automation, and data sources within and outside the realm of Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
With the actors, their actions, and the flow of the system documented, the team joined forces and proceeded to build three Power Apps to meet the needs of the various actors, ranging from social workers, supervisors, administrators, and delivery drivers.
Along the way, our 2toLead consultants and their Administrative Services Team participated in the design and development sessions to create each app. This approach allowed for training the team as we developed the Power Apps and Power Automate Flows needed for each step of the process.
Leveraging data from on-premises data sources
A critical business need derived from the analysis was to read client data and present it using Power Apps. This data resided on-premises. Given the nature of its sensitivity, we needed a secure and efficient solution that allowed this data to be exposed to our Power App users while ensuring it would remain available at any time.
To meet this need, our architect team proposed a Hybrid Data Architecture model. This model leverages Common Data Service to store client information and update it regularly. The scenario called for using an on-premises data access gateway to connect to the SQL Server Instance on-premises. With the information now stored in a cloud entity, it was ready to be leveraged by Power Apps, or Power Automate flows that required it.
To complement the architecture, we also considered the use of Power BI to report on data from cloud sources such as our data entities and on-premises data residing in SQL Server.
What’s next for the organization?
With a solid foundation in place to communicate and collaborate with modern tools, and the resources to train new and existing employees, their team is well-positioned to invest further in making the operation more secure, efficient and adaptable to the needs of the organization.
The knowledge gained from building their first apps in the Power Platform will boost their confidence in the platform to continue optimizing and automating business processes and simplifying their reporting solutions to bring data and actions to the front lines. This experience, in turn, will contribute to supporting the organization in continuing to fulfill its mission to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
The power of a partner on your journey
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. Experiencing business transformation takes an intentional partnership with the business's knowledge and the expertise to optimize and implement technology in a way that meets your business outcomes. Our team is passionate and strives to work together to make the journey much more comfortable to walk along. Let us join your organization's journey towards digital transformation and business process optimization together.
Microsoft 365 Cloud Security and Governance when External...
| Industry | Law |
| Org Size | 500 + |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Azur SharePoint Microsoft Teams OneDrive |
2toLead recently worked with one of Atlantic Canada's largest regional law firms. They reached out to us for guidance on using SharePoint Online to share information with external users, primarily their clients.
They were curious to explore the use of SharePoint Online for their clients and ensure they had easy and secure access while experiencing the platform. The team was particularly interested in the key areas that would help them secure access, ensure sensitive information was protected, and learn how to guarantee the configuration needed for Extranet sites was repeatable to keep compliant and maintain consistency.
The law firm was looking for a team that had the same philosophies around innovating and customer excellence. 2toLead was a great choice given our extensive experience building Intranet and Extranet portals as well as our breadth and depth of knowledge in the Microsoft 365 platform. The client's primary need was to move towards building an extranet service based on SharePoint Online that integrates with other systems for a more cohesive client experience. Join us in taking a look at the journey we took to better governed and more secure sharing.
TIP | If you are looking to improve governance, our eBook on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl can help!
Our journey toward better Microsoft 365 cloud security when external sharing begins
To determine the team's specific needs, we began our journey by holding a series of discovery sessions. These interactive discussions centered on governance, security, and compliance. The team was highly engaged and keen to learn what is possible in the platform, so we peeled back the various layers of Microsoft 365. We did this to ensure we had a common understanding of the platform's possibilities and gain user needs and insights that would drive our recommendations towards what specific areas needed to be defined and configured.
Peeling the external sharing onion
While the storefront for an extranet based on Office 365 is traditionally a SharePoint Extranet, we reviewed the different areas where the platform is malleable to configure a safe and secure collaboration experience. Along the way, we dove in to discuss Azure Active Directory, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, and OneDrive external sharing. We also looked at relevant policies and settings in Microsoft Teams to ensure proper coverage of the many ways one can collaborate and share with others.
The team was particularly interested in the platform's federation and single sign-on capabilities (as they were using a third-party solution to accomplish this goal. A more extensive and organization-specific analysis was done to identify the level of support and effort to migrate the SSO capability from the third-party platform to Azure Active Directory.
Add more personable moments, to highlight the relationship and good collaboration with the client.
- SSO piece, added interactive aspect to our discovery discussions
Thought leadership: showcase an example and a moment that marks the 2toLead difference.
- SSO piece, adding value beyond the basics
- Extranet/Intranet portals our core strength
Check about us page for client and map out values to journey where applicable.
- Added commitment to innovation and adding value to client with the firm intent to make their life’s easier.
A key differentiator for them as opposed to any other client.
- Their focus on innovation is clearly stated
Governance as the mainline for putting all the pieces together
In isolation, these capabilities allow us to configure the main pieces. However, we took special consideration in managing the container's lifecycle, site provisioning, and guest management.
Our findings raised important considerations for managing and automating these crucial processes to establish a repeatable and auditable process that balances business agility and security.
Keeping sensitive information safe and secure
Our compliance discussions highlighted the need for defining a set of policies and labeling that can support users on day one of using their extranet and prevents leakage of sensitive information. On the other hand, the need to define retention based on key document types, locations, automated or manual led to raising awareness and establishing an information governance strategy to support internal and external users as they adopt the new system.
On the security front, we also evaluated the need for defining a clear set of policies to ensure the right people have the proper access to data. Azure Active Directory played a vital role in these discussions. Capabilities such as Multi-Factor Authentication, Conditional Access, Terms of Use, and advanced group management provided the team with the right pieces to strengthen their security posture. These essential pieces would help provide peace of mind, even as they bring guest users into the Extranet environment.
Trust, but verifying
Another important consideration for security was the ability to audit user activity. The unified audit logging capabilities of the platform complement their existing investments on security.
These capabilities support the team by being alerted of critical risks associated with external sharing and other administration related tasks, ensuring prompt detection and mitigation should the need arise.
By performing access reviews using the Azure Active Directory capabilities, the team can ensure the right people have access to resources by periodically triggering reviews and providing the information to the owners of the content to attest to the access granted.
What is next?
While the journey continues for the law firm, the team now has a roadmap that sets out a clear path to follow based on business needs and prioritized next steps. Key milestones include defining their governance and information architecture needs towards automation of extranet site creation. In parallel, the team works with relevant parties to refine integration points with other systems to further enhance their clients' experience.
Let us tag along
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. If you are unsure about what you need for your digital transformation journey, reach out to us. Our strategy services can help you identify the key pieces to consider and set you up for success. Better yet, if you need a team of experts and passionate consultants to walk the path with you, let us tag along and bring the umbrella to protect you from rainy days.
Delivering content that is important to Magna Employees around...
| Industry | Manufacturing & Automotive |
| Org Size | 150,000+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 SharePoint Azure |
Magna International is a $40B Canadian-based, leading global automotive supplier. It employs roughly 158,000 people from 342 manufacturing facilities (Divisions) and 91 product development, engineering, and sales centres, operating within 7 product-based Groups, across 27 countries. This diversity is a massive strength for the company, but it needed to be supported in the right way to ensure employees find the information they need, when they need it.
Information Overload in Today’s World
In today’s world, we are all overloaded with information. From social media, to news, to chat groups with your friends, to new and interesting podcasts. There is a lot of content coming at us. It is hard to follow, and it is even harder to identify what is important.
This problem is just as true at companies as it is within our personal lives. There are documents everywhere. Notifications everywhere. Company news in your email, on your intranet, in the media, and, likely, in many places you wish it wasn’t.
Too much information in the Digital Workplace
Employees and managers wrestle with this daily. The objective is to provide the most relevant information to employees, at the right time, in the right way, and ultimately increase productivity. This is not easy. It is difficult and a challenge that can be daunting for any business.
Organizations invest a lot of time and resources into creating ways to automate this challenge. Often, algorithms are made to suggest content that may be relevant to employees. This can be based on which documents employees work on, teammates they collaborate with often, or information that might be trending from across the company.
Algorithms like these can be highly effective. One example is Google Search. We all use Google Search, it works great. These algorithms do have problems though. They are biased. They can lead to people getting stuck in a tunnel of self-reinforcing recommendations. This is not good for discoverability.
In addition to these recommendation engines, we must explore other ways of surfacing content to employees, ways that encourage discoverability. One such method is through matching the types of content created for employees to their place within the organization. This allows for a constant stream of content that is relevant to the user but broader than their immediate use case.
The Journey to Better Information Distribution
Our team has been fortunate in being able to support Magna with the growth of their Digital Workplace. We have had a long-lasting partnership and have developed many content discoverability solutions together.
One of those solutions was the Content Stream, a multi-faceted content personalization and content targeting aggregator that provides relevant information to employees on their intranet, MagNET. The Content Stream became a true beacon of increased information flow for Magna employees, but creating it required a deep understanding of the needs and pain points of their employees.
Large, global organizations have a very broad range of employee profiles. A key feature of the Content Stream is its ability to target content to employees based on their unique profile. This was a critical feature for Magna, as they were focused on surfacing relevant information to their employees as soon as they landed on the intranet.
Information Architecture – Taking care of the foundation
One of the first challenges that we had to overcome was a lack of information architecture consistency across their intranet. We worked closely with Magna’s Corporate Communications teams to identify consistent metadata that could be used to classify information on the intranet. This metadata was coded into SharePoint site templates to make it easy to apply it consistently every time a new intranet site was created. Essentially, creating 'information anchors' to streamline information findability across the intranet.
Content Roll-Up – Pulling the right information
Our second major challenge was developing a content experience that was powerful enough to roll up relevant content for employees from across hundreds of SharePoint sites that make up the intranet. Through user interviews, personas, pain point and needs analysis, as well as deep design thinking exercises with the team, we created a Content Stream experience that surfaced news from across the Intranet into a single, branded stream of publications.
This stream has many targeting settings that work off our information architecture foundations. Importantly, we enabled a setting that when selected, presents news to employees that align with their Group, Function, and Region within the organization.
Azure Active Directory – Connect the dots for personalization
Our final major challenge was ensuring the intranet had the information that it needed to make a match between an employee’s profile and the metadata pattern of news articles. Through a close partnership with Magna’s IT team, we worked out the infrastructure and integrations required to sync their on-premises Active Directory information with Azure Active Directory and SharePoint’s user profile service. Schemas were designed, integrations coded, and data began to flow from a single source of truth to where it could be referenceable and matched to news published on the intranet.
What’s next for Magna International and 2toLead?
Through a user-first, cross-platform, cross-team effort, working with various functions across the organization, we designed an integrated and personalized news experience for Magna employees. When they open their intranet, they see news that is both relevant to them, but also news that encourages discoverability. Employees are now more productive in being able to find relevant announcements and have a much-improved news experience.
However, this is not the end of our journey. In addition to building many other content discoverability features with Magna, we are continuing to work together to enhance their digital workplace experience. From personalized communications newsletters to news analytics that track engagement and employee sentiment, we are just getting started.
Why it matters and how 2toLead can help
Building experiences that amplify the user experience and allow employees to discover relevant content when they need it most is a difficult challenge. Organizations need to embrace internal communication and collaboration challenges if they seek to empower their staff to be the most productive version of themselves.
We have been fortunate to develop deep expertise in creating employee digital experiences that lead to real change in organizations. It is our passion. We also have various whitepapers and if this whitepaper rings for your, then you may find our intranet and adoption whitepapers particularly interested and topical.
If you are interested in working together to build a similar experience, as seen in this intranet case study, for your company, talk to us. We would love to help you with your journey.
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Microsoft 365 Intranets
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
Microsoft 365 Adoption
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
Microsoft 365 Business Impact
Find out how to identify and measure the business value Microsoft 365 provides with examples and advice on Microsoft 365 reporting and metrics.
SharePoint Migration
Learn migration best practices, and how to best plan and execute a SharePoint upgrade or migration to SharePoint Online from file shares, legacy systems, older versions of SharePoint, and more.
External Sharing With Microsoft 365
Download this whitepaper now to discover guidance and insights based on our experience improving external sharing and collaboration with hundreds of customers in a wide variety of industries and organization sizes.
“When To Use What” In Office 365
Download this whitepaper to find guidance, insights, and recommendations that are based on our experience working with hundreds of customers in a wide variety of industries and organization sizes.
2
whitepapers
SharePoint and Teams Sprawl
eBook | Learn about the most common SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl issues and how to solve them. Also, gain insight into how Sprawl impacts both the end-user and IT.
Digital Communication & Collaboration Advantages
eBook | Learn about the digital communication and collaboration advantages provided by a Microsoft 365 Intranet and digital workplace in our eBook.
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eBooks
Office 365 Success Kit
We have worked extensively with Office 365 and in an effort to be generous with our guidance we have shared many templates, samples and resources.
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kits
A Look Inside Our Microsoft 365 Business Impact Whitepaper
As is typical for many technologies used at the enterprise level, building the business case for Microsoft 365 usually comes down to three simple words: Return on Investment (ROI). Executives and technology evangelists alike constantly search for ways to quantify ROI, providing tangible proof that the money put into these technology solutions produces a worthwhile and measurable payback.
Of course, Microsoft 365 is not immune to the fundamental laws of economics. Suppose the technology does not help increase company revenue, improve employee productivity, or cut expenses. In that case, few executives will commit time and resources to deploy or invest in improving adoption and usage.
Our recently updated whitepaper is designed to provide practical advice for leaders who want to put Microsoft 365 to work but wrestle with the challenges of justifying its value after deployment.
A Look Inside Our Microsoft Whitepaper
This blog will only provide a glimpse at the various sections of the whitepaper. For full details, download our Microsoft 365 Business Impact Whitepaper.
The following are the sections from the whitepaper that we will take a look at:
- Measuring and improving business impact
- Understanding and aligning business objectives
- Business Impact by Microsoft 365 capabilities
- Business Impact Examples
Measuring And Improving Business Impact
There are a few key considerations for determining and measuring business impact.
1. Identify ways Microsoft 365 can drive business impact.
- Just knowing that there is an impact is the first step.
- This whitepaper is meant to address and accelerate this step.
2. Measure the business impact.
- This should be done before Microsoft 365 technologies are implemented, while adoption/usage is being improved, after and during investment activities or as new capabilities are introduced.
- Within this whitepaper, we have provided suggestions for how you might approach measuring some of these business impacts.
3. Take proactive steps based on the measurements and insights shared.
4. Measure the business impact.
5. Repeat steps 1-4.
Gain a greater understanding of these key consideration for determining and measuring business impact in our whitepaper.
Understand And Align Your Business Objectives
For a technology investment to be relevant and for key stakeholders to care about that technology, it is critical to show that the technology positively impacts helping realize important business objectives.
It is often challenging to map the technology solutions and uses we have for technology to business objectives. This is difficult for two key reasons. The first reason is that most business objectives are not specific enough, clear enough, or detailed enough. The second reason is that it can be difficult to visualize the relationship in a way that key stakeholders will immediately recognize.
The image above is a visual example of how these platitudes (or meaningless objectives) might break down into something that has meaning to the organization and also an example of the insight waiting for you in our whitepaper.
Business Impact By Microsoft 365 Capabilities
This subsequent section will outline examples of business impact and how they correlate to key apps and services provided by Microsoft 365.
At this time, we have mapped examples and correlations between the following technologies:
Discover our mapped examples and correlations between all of Microsoft 365 in our business impact whitepaper.
Business Impact Examples
The following are categories of business impact that Microsoft 365 influences. We have included suggestions for measuring each one. Our intention with this approach is to help organizations understand that these benefits can be quantified. Also, it may not be as challenging, thanks to the richer availability of data and insights from the Microsoft 365 platform.
Throughout these measurements, it’s important to understand that each customer is unique.
Here are a few high-level suggestions when you calculate your own ROI:
- We often calculate real-world numbers using estimates for the inefficiency of productivity or cost transfer as not every resource that gets time back will be able to apply it to productive benefits for the organization at the same efficiency level.
- Never do single-point estimates. A range is extremely valuable as it communicates confidence. If it helps, consider creating a low, medium, and high value for each if a range won't work for your decision criteria. Even with further discounting for risk, if the low value is a favorable investment with a good return, that should be enough for the business decision.
- Measuring over time is important. We are cautious about doing multi-year ROI calculations where we don't discount the benefit over time since digital patterns, industry patterns, and your own employee patterns change over time.
- Keep track of all your assumptions. If someone disagrees with your calculations or is not confident in them, you can always input different assumptions or let them experiment with your model (Excel is great for this). Disagree with the suggested salary or cost of the employee? Just change those values to create more variations or professional perspectives on the ROI parameters.
Isn’t It Time You Understand the Impact You Are Having?
All corporate champions of Microsoft 365 deployment want to prove how the technology can pull its financial weight. The path to achieving this lies in understanding the variables that impact ROI evaluation.
Some of the metrics discussed in our whitepaper may vary based on how you use Microsoft 365, but the economic principles remain the same. The economic principles boiled down to: Identify the business value generated by Microsoft 365 deployments and measure it against the costs of implementing these technologies or improving their usage.
Uncover what you should be focusing on with the help of our 50+ page whitepaper on measuring the business impact of Microsoft 365.
Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements
Microsoft Inspire 2021 was another incredible global event that brought us some interesting and exciting announcements from Microsoft. If you haven’t had a chance, be sure to review the Microsoft Inspire 2021 Book of News. As a Microsoft Gold Partner across many categories and an active leader in multiple advisory boards and preview programs, the announcements are often not new to our team. However, we wanted to take a moment to highlight a few key announcements that get us the most excited.
Our 3 Favorite Highlights From Microsoft Inspire
With all of the incredible Microsoft applications moving the meter on the advancement of Digital Workplaces everywhere, you might be wondering, what are the top three announcements/updates from this year’s global Microsoft partner event, Microsoft Inspire 2021.
After discussing with our all-star team of Microsoft MVPs and award winners, we are happy to bring our top 3 highlights from Inspire.
1. Richer & More Integrated Employee Experiences
Microsoft is now leading the charge in first-party integration with popular services and products. In addition, they are making it easier for customers and partners like ourselves to integrate these apps and services across the places users already work today, such as within Microsoft Teams, or surfaced contextually through experiences like Microsoft Viva Topics in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Office.
There are now 20+ partners who have rich integration throughout Microsoft Viva experiences.
Combine this with the existing 100+ Microsoft search connectors that make it easier to provide unified search and better search and graph-based experiences. (This 100+ connector number includes 9 first-party connectors from Microsoft for popular systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, File Shares, and more.)
2. More For Less
As a company that runs its business on Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, we are also extremely excited about the richer (and now free) integration that enables us to discuss, engage around, coordinate with and work on Dynamics activities in Microsoft Teams.
Earlier this month, Microsoft made some pretty big announcements on Power Platform pricing that help companies like ours, and hundreds of our customers do more with less as it relates to business applications and solutions. By reducing the licensing costs by half, more companies can enhance digital experiences and provide meaningful applications and automation through Power Apps and Power Automate.
Costs have shifted from $40 to $20 per user per month for Power Apps per users plans, and from $10 per user/app/month to $5 per user/app/month on October 1st. This price change effectively gives already invested customers money back from their budget for more apps and automation. Also, for many who are just getting started, the promotional pricing is a lower initial cost of ownership.
This also impacted Power Portals so if you haven’t looked at them – take another look as the solutions we have been implementing with customers here are often customer or B2B facing and prove that the Power Platform doesn’t just have to be used for internal applications/automation.
Other announcements provide more ways for vendors like us to provide greater discounts or ensure what you buy through the Microsoft marketplace experiences are closer to their costs by reducing their fees from the industry standard of 20% to 3%.
3. Sustainability Initiatives & Making Sustainability More Digitally Accessible
It can be easy to underestimate just how challenging it is for a company to respond and support the important work needed to meet sustainability goals and respond to one of the most urgent crises facing out planet. However, Microsoft certainly made it easier for organizations like ours and many of our customers by releasing a new “Cloud for Sustainability” later this year.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability enables any organization to record, report, reduce, and replace their emissions more easily and effectively as they relate to IT carbon emissions, which is a great forward step. It will be much harder for organizations to avoid tackling, measuring, and working on sustainability if doing so becomes more accessible and easier to manage.
Expanding your knowledge for FREE
If you are looking for more insights into previous or future announcements, keep in mind that not only are we a Microsoft Gold Partner, but our team is comprised of Microsoft MVPs, and board members. We always have time available to share knowledge, insights, and context on Microsoft 365 and Azure that can help organizations like yourselves be more successful.
Or maybe you looking to learn more about the incredible Digital Workplace offerings from Microsoft 365 or how best to implement them? Dive into our library of resources.
Microsoft 365 Intranets
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Microsoft Inspire is a time of learning, discovery, and new and old partnerships. In the spirit of the event, we have put together a tribute to solution partners that inspire us to push the envelope with Microsoft 365 digital workplaces.
If you are looking for the top 3 highlights of the event, take a look at our blog titled "Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements" for the details.
Microsoft has Inspired 400K+ Services & Solution Companies, Globally
This partner portfolio is incredibly diverse, and it can be challenging to navigate. We have evaluated and collaborated with hundreds of active Microsoft 365 product companies to ensure our customers get the right fit from the best and brightest Microsoft partners. If you are an incredible organization and we haven’t worked with you as a partner, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Our own leadership team has managed and led dozens of Microsoft Services partners, and when we created 2toLead, we didn’t want to establish another Microsoft consultancy. We wanted to establish an organization that customers, partners, and communities know will do the right thing, go the extra mile, and have been fortunate enough to be called a generous consulting company. If you are looking to join our growing team or know exceptional people, please don’t hesitate to reach out on our LinkedIn postings we have up, as we are always hiring.
Microsoft Is Changing & So Are All Of Us
Microsoft and Microsoft 365 have been pushing the evolution of digital business practices since both of their inceptions. Microsoft 365 has grown a lot since the early years, and it only continues to advance as Teams, and SharePoint active daily users are at all-time highs, with no signs of slowing down.
There are entirely new challenges and opportunities in the Microsoft Power Platform space, with Azure, and in the growing ways, AI and cloud insights provide new ways to work and create business solutions.
It is an incredible time to be a Microsoft partner, and we are thrilled at the rate of innovation, not only because of the opportunities this creates for our customers and partners but also because it helps us re-invent, re-align, and always learn new things.
The 14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Not only has Microsoft done incredible things on its own, but it is also tethered to an incredible partner ecosystem of services and solutions. They have helped Microsoft push the envelope and/or helped to fill in some gaps that a company focusing on the many can’t always afford.
This blog will identify the partners that inspire us, why they inspire us and a brief description of what they do.
These partners include:
- AvePoint
- BA Insights
- CardioLog
- Layer2
- LiveTiles
- Orchestry
- Panagenda
- Powell
- Quest
- Rencore
- ShareGate
- tyGraph
- Tzunami
- Valo
For a little more on each partner, visit our partner page or contact us to discover if they are right for your needs.
AvePoint
AvePoint offers an incredible breadth of products and services that make it easier, and speedier, to accomplish tasks whether your organization is all in with the cloud or in a Hybrid state. These products/services include Cloud Archiving, Cloud Backup, Citizen Services, File Share navigation (from in M365), GroupHub, Cloud Insights, Cloud Management, MyHub, Cloud Governance, Policies & Insights, Cloud Records, Administrator, Archiver, Backup & Restore, Compliance Guardian Platform, Connector, Content Manager, Data Validation, Classification & Protection, Deployment Manager, Discovery Tooling, Enterprise Risk Management, File Share Archiver, Cloud & SharePoint Migration, Governance Automation, Meetings, High Availability, Office Connect, Perimeter, Records, Replicator, Report Center and Storage Manager.
https://twitter.com/AvePoint/status/1415657662226878476
Why they inspire us
AvePoint has incredible breadth in it’s offerings. It is always relevant in today’s Microsoft 365 enterprise strategy discussions. Whether it’s leveraging… MyHub for managing Microsoft 365 workspaces and creating new ones… we are always happy when we see that our customers have invested in AvePoint.
BA Insights
Connect knowledge with seekers, reward questions with results, stop sifting and start asking. BA Insight provides internet-like enterprise search for organizations that want their knowledge to be askable. They do this by providing personalized, intelligent, connected (over 80 enterprise systems), relevant (automated and intelligent meta tagging) and in-app search from anywhere.
https://twitter.com/BAinsight/status/1413209546248556545
Why they inspire us
The power of a modern, intelligent and connected search has often been out of reach for many organizations due to cost, complexity and feasibility. This has fundamentally changed with Microsoft Search, search improvements and incredible ecosystem advances like those led by BA Insight who has created smart search solutions such as connectors for 80+ enterprise systems.
CardioLog
CardioLog Analytics enables organizations to provide in-depth Office 365 analytics, insights, trends, adoption productivity and usage reports, but more importantly makes those analytics easier to engage, enhance and enforce. As an example CardioLog enables you to target users based on behaviour and enforce certain security policies that improve data safeguarding.
Why they inspire us
The way CardioLog approaches adoption is aligned perfectly with the way we encourage organizations to leverage adoption campaigns and a just in time and in place communication approach. Between the way they use analytics with built in tooling for these adoption and communication tactics as well as enforcement is something that differentiates them from some of the other analytic vendors in the marketplace and is one of the big reasons we love working with them.
Layer2
Layer2 leading solutions is the market-leading provider of data integration and document synchronization solutions for the Microsoft Cloud, focusing on Office 365, SharePoint, and Azure. More than 2.500 companies worldwide and regional partners trust in Layer2 products to keep data and files in sync between 100+ systems and apps in the cloud and on-premises.
Why they inspire us
It is almost unbelievable that a synchronization approach to integration like what Layer2 makes easier to accomplish, can provide literally millions of dollars of value in only a few months. From integrating data sources into extranet sites like supplier portals to avoiding complex integration risks and licensing impacts this is one technology you don’t want to miss out on.
LiveTiles
Organizations everywhere look to LiveTiles to provide them with top tier solutions that elevate their SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environments, innovating beyond them, no matter the size of the organization. With some of the world's most recognizable brands using their product, we would love to show you how their revolutionary digital workplace solutions offer broad and deep end-to-end capability to meet the needs of a modern digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/livetiles/status/1415642564779204610
Why they inspire us
Just look at a leading Digital Workplace vendor like LiveTiles. They have explored and assessed the gaps in Microsoft's Intranet platform and provided solutions that build on what Microsoft does well, while challenging and providing intelligently architected solutions where Microsoft falls short. They don't only do that, but they do it in such a way that it makes it easy for customers or companies like ours to further extend and enhance it easily.
Orchestry
Orchestry is a balanced platform composed of adoption tools, engaging templates, controlled provisioning, and empowering self-service to drive usage and adoption success in Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. Orchestry has pioneered a comprehensive governance, adoption and enablement tool for Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, that delivers control while empowering greater access to all users. They are a fairly new company but have years of knowledge in the companies founders that have been poured back into the solution.
https://twitter.com/OrchestrySoft/status/1414723753779597316
Why they inspire us
What’s incredible is how clever Orchestry’s approach is on making the provisioning or creation process of new Teams and Sites not only easier with excellent templating/automation, but in making the challenge of when to use what easier as well. When you combine this with the ongoing challenge on managing the lifecycle and navigation of these spaces… it’s clear that the Orchestry approach really does make a difference.
Panagenda
Panagenda’s OfficeExpert is a modular solution that significantly improves productivity, end user experience and job satisfaction using unrivaled Office 365 performance measurement and monitoring technology. The insight it can provide can greatly help large scale global customers better manage and understand how Microsoft 365 is being used.
https://twitter.com/panagenda/status/1405523122707734528
Why they inspire us
Panagenda understands large global enterprise customer challenges when it comes to Microsoft 365 and for licensing management they have always been easy to recommend, but the signals, monitoring and analytics in teams… especially when comparing against Zoom, Webex or other products/services in your own organization is incredibly valuable.
Powell
Powell Intranet and Teams offers compelling capabilities whether you are looking for newsroom publishing, events management, social communities, knowledge centers, search experiences, employee directories, analytics, better templating, improved navigation, better employee services or better corporate branding. IT departments everywhere are tasked with managing and maintaining their corporate digital workplace. The internal communications, rightfully, wants something enticing and easy-to-use but sometimes those solutions come at a cost. With Powell's intranet solution, IT and internal communications can both get exactly what they want.
https://twitter.com/PowellSoftware/status/1394943545535078406
Why they inspire us
Powell Manager and the Powell approach leans into the gap of effective design and templating that Microsoft hasn't filled by providing an extensible and intuitive experience that automates or simplifies so many things our customers and we as consultants must do to achieve a highly successful digital workplace.
Quest
Quest provides enterprise scale and well-rounded cloud solutions that are ready to take you from platform migration to cloud deployments quickly and effectively. Security and governance are other areas that their solution shines. The company has been around since 1987 and have packed those years of IT knowledge into their latest offerings that cover the breadth of Microsoft 365 services and applications.
https://twitter.com/Quest/status/1415673775077543944
Why they inspire us
Quest has a long history of providing solutions our customers need and their acquisition of Metalogix has further grown their relevant and useful portfolio of Microsoft 365 solutions for us. When it comes to Lotus Notes and a variety of other migration scenarios Quest is always at the top of our customers, and our own list as the vendor to engage for the right end-to-end approach.
Rencore
Rencore is an incredible company that provides governance automation solutions that help you stay in control of Microsoft 365. You can easily identify anomalies and trends that might affect your governance plan for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Azure, and Power Platform and automate the necessary next steps.
https://twitter.com/Rencore/status/1415317351101239304
Why they inspire us
Rencore understands the technical complexity of the Microsoft 365 platform. We love Rencore Code (SPCAF) and have used it for years helping our customers analyze and assure code quality when building on SharePoint, Office 365 and Teams. Now we loving the incredible potential of Rencore Governance as it’s focus on the whole of the M365 platform is hard not to love… There aren’t many who offer Power Platform governance improvement and automation alongside Teams and SharePoint while also considering Microsoft Stream, Dynamics and more.
ShareGate
Renown for providing an easy to use tool that has and continues to enable thousands of successful migrations for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. ShareGate is a premier solution in the migration space and can simplify and aid in the complex migration many systems to your Microsoft 365 digital workplace. They are truly the simplest way for IT to succeed with a faster transition to the Microsoft cloud.
Also, monitor your tenant and highlight ways to make it healthier based on the policies you set. Then automate and action those improvements. With many years in the industry, ShareGate, being migration specialists, saw what was happening to digital workplaces after everything had been migrated and set out to solve the issue of management and governance that comes with growth. That is when ShareGate Apricot was born, an IT first solution designed to ensure your organization can rest easy when it comes to some of the most common (and challenging) governance scenarios for Microsoft Teams.
https://twitter.com/sharegatetools/status/1394310410732511233
Why they inspire us
What’s great about ShareGate is that even after so many years of enhancements, new capabilities, and improvements it still is so darn simple to use. For so many organizations they just need an easy to learn, understand and well supported solution for migration and some of the most common management/optimization activities that you need to do and it’s here that ShareGate delivers.
tyGraph
tyGraph uses deep insights into adoption patterns to ensure your KPI’s are being met, or what to do about those that aren’t. With tyGraph you can quickly find key influencers, subject matter experts and trends to incorporate into your digital transformation and improvement strategy. We find tyGraph to not only be accurate and useful but actionable when it comes to their analytics.
https://twitter.com/tyGraphTweets/status/1415391887561789446
Why they inspire us
What is great about tyGraph is that they extract every bit of insight possible from the Microsoft 365 platform today and then they provide the intelligence to make many of those insights more actionable. When you think of all the audited activities in Microsoft 365 that is an incredible feat.
Tzunami
Simplify your data migration with the help of Tzunami's migration tooling. They have targeted solutions that enable you to automate and simplify migrating from confluence, eRoom, Documentum, LiveLink, DocuShare, eDocs, Hummingbird, HPE Content Manager, Lotus Notes, Atlassian Confluence, Egnyte, BIM 360 and many more.
Why they inspire us
Tzunami is a critical partner for so many migration scenarios where they are not only the most relevant choice, but they are often a choice that saves hundreds of hours of manual or custom migration work for us.
Valo
Valo focuses on a beautiful UI/UX experience with the ability to deploy quickly, since most of the staple features and experiences are baked into the solution. With a variety of solutions that are directly integrated into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, Valo's digital workplace products might be the perfect fit for your organization. From their main intranet solution, Valo Intranet, to their ideation solution, Valo Ideas, they are ready to strengthen your digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/valointranet/status/1415415869220421634
Why they inspire us
What is great about Valo is how effectively they have simplified some of the big Intranet challenges, and done so in a way that is accessible and extremely cost competitive. It's well built and they are constantly innovating where they see opportunities to further enhance the Microsoft digital workplace offering.
Continuing to inspire
Just like our partners, we continue to push the boundaries of what is deemed possible with Microsoft 365. We hope you have found this blog has opened your eyes to the incredible solutions outside of Microsoft that work with it to improve.
If you are looking for more information on the capabilities of Microsoft 365, we are sure you will find one of our free resources insightful and full with actionable information.
SharePoint and Teams Sprawl
eBook | Learn about the most common SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl issues and how to solve them. Also, gain insight into how Sprawl impacts both the end-user and IT.
Microsoft 365 Adoption
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
Digital Communication & Collaboration Advantages
eBook | Learn about the digital communication and collaboration advantages provided by a Microsoft 365 Intranet and digital workplace in our eBook.
Microsoft 365 Business Impact
Find out how to identify and measure the business value Microsoft 365 provides with examples and advice on Microsoft 365 reporting and metrics.
Children's Non-Profit Organization Sees Advantages of Digital...
| Industry | Non-Profit Social Services |
| Org Size | 100+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Teams SharePoint Power Platform |
Non-profit community organization funded by the Government, legally mandated to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
When the organization was looking to transform how they communicate and collaborate with staff and social workers, they partnered with 2toLead to ensure success. Their team used a legacy Intranet platform for sharing essential links and day-to-day relevant information. Another integral repository was the file server, which also needed to migrate to SharePoint Online. After an initial step in the right direction, moving from a Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft 365, they stayed committed to supporting their workforce during the transition.
As a non-profit organization, agility and efficiency are paramount to empower their team to reach as many people who need them as possible. The organization had the vision to provide the right tools, proper training and communication to support its staff. 2toLead was there to make it happen by leveraging their team of Microsoft 365 champions.
Establishing what the advantages of digital transformation mean for them
Our journey began in October 2019 by meeting with their IT and Administrative Services team. We focused on creating the foundational pieces and a new tool or channel that compelled users to visit, interact, and get information. Their staff looks at the Intranet as the source of critical information, raising the stakes of its importance.
At the time, Microsoft Teams was being piloted by their IT department to evaluate its capabilities and to identify how both Teams and SharePoint would complement each other. A question that's on the minds of many organizations today.
The building blocks of their Intranet
Our first release focused on providing the foundation for an Intranet that supported the central communication and collaboration functions of their team. As the organization had recently embraced the Microsoft 365 platform for email, leveraging SharePoint Online to build the foundation for their Intranet was a natural choice due to the strengths of a connected digital workplace.
With an agile set of workshops to cover our information architecture, navigation, and search capabilities, we confirmed our requirements for the new Intranet.
As part of our discussions, we reviewed the governance and life cycle planning aspects relevant to creating new communities using the platform. The use of wireframes and mockups were essential to iterate and confirm our requirements for visual impact faster.
Planning and executing the migration
With the foundation in place and the Intranet platform built, we rolled up our sleeves and dug into the file shares.
The team assessed the various file shares provided to staff for individual use (home drives), department level, and global use. The team used the gathered information to ensure the right documents were migrated.
Personal files: the team documented clear instructions for employees to move their data to OneDrive for Business.
More extensive data repositories: our migration consultants supported the team and migrated their information from their shared drives to SharePoint Online.
Adapting to the new normal with targeted training
During our journey, the Coronavirus pandemic brought additional challenges that compelled the non-profit to act fast and accelerate their plans for adoption, particularly for Microsoft Teams. Rolling out Microsoft Teams was vital to uphold their principles of service excellence and collaboration in the face of an unprecedented change to how work happens.
The Microsoft Teams rollout took priority, and from a technical perspective, it was simple to deploy. However, employees struggled to adapt to the new environment and needed additional support to remain productive. Internally, the staff received initial training and supporting resources, but they wanted to take it a step further.
Their team decided to provide more targeted training. With the help and information provided by them, 2toLead delivered a tailored training program focused on best practices and collaboration boosters. This empowered employees to use Microsoft 365 and Teams to their fullest potential. Additionally, given their recent transition to a new email and calendaring system, we emphasized tips and best practices for managing email, scheduling meetings, and organizing calendar events.
Taking the first steps towards business process automation
Accelerated by the new normal, and to facilitate critical business processes, we identified areas that needed automation. The Power Platform was a solid choice as the technology to underpin the efforts. The team had just begun their business transformation journey and needed a partner to walk the path and not only implement the critical business processes, but also acquire the knowledge internally by being part of the process.
To meet this goal, they partnered with 2toLead to automate a process for distributing vouchers to families in need.
The voucher administration process is a critical process that involved various departments, automation, and data sources within and outside the realm of Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
With the actors, their actions, and the flow of the system documented, the team joined forces and proceeded to build three Power Apps to meet the needs of the various actors, ranging from social workers, supervisors, administrators, and delivery drivers.
Along the way, our 2toLead consultants and their Administrative Services Team participated in the design and development sessions to create each app. This approach allowed for training the team as we developed the Power Apps and Power Automate Flows needed for each step of the process.
Leveraging data from on-premises data sources
A critical business need derived from the analysis was to read client data and present it using Power Apps. This data resided on-premises. Given the nature of its sensitivity, we needed a secure and efficient solution that allowed this data to be exposed to our Power App users while ensuring it would remain available at any time.
To meet this need, our architect team proposed a Hybrid Data Architecture model. This model leverages Common Data Service to store client information and update it regularly. The scenario called for using an on-premises data access gateway to connect to the SQL Server Instance on-premises. With the information now stored in a cloud entity, it was ready to be leveraged by Power Apps, or Power Automate flows that required it.
To complement the architecture, we also considered the use of Power BI to report on data from cloud sources such as our data entities and on-premises data residing in SQL Server.
What’s next for the organization?
With a solid foundation in place to communicate and collaborate with modern tools, and the resources to train new and existing employees, their team is well-positioned to invest further in making the operation more secure, efficient and adaptable to the needs of the organization.
The knowledge gained from building their first apps in the Power Platform will boost their confidence in the platform to continue optimizing and automating business processes and simplifying their reporting solutions to bring data and actions to the front lines. This experience, in turn, will contribute to supporting the organization in continuing to fulfill its mission to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
The power of a partner on your journey
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. Experiencing business transformation takes an intentional partnership with the business's knowledge and the expertise to optimize and implement technology in a way that meets your business outcomes. Our team is passionate and strives to work together to make the journey much more comfortable to walk along. Let us join your organization's journey towards digital transformation and business process optimization together.
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A Look Inside Our Microsoft 365 Business Impact Whitepaper
As is typical for many technologies used at the enterprise level, building the business case for Microsoft 365 usually comes down to three simple words: Return on Investment (ROI). Executives and technology evangelists alike constantly search for ways to quantify ROI, providing tangible proof that the money put into these technology solutions produces a worthwhile and measurable payback.
Of course, Microsoft 365 is not immune to the fundamental laws of economics. Suppose the technology does not help increase company revenue, improve employee productivity, or cut expenses. In that case, few executives will commit time and resources to deploy or invest in improving adoption and usage.
Our recently updated whitepaper is designed to provide practical advice for leaders who want to put Microsoft 365 to work but wrestle with the challenges of justifying its value after deployment.
A Look Inside Our Microsoft Whitepaper
This blog will only provide a glimpse at the various sections of the whitepaper. For full details, download our Microsoft 365 Business Impact Whitepaper.
The following are the sections from the whitepaper that we will take a look at:
- Measuring and improving business impact
- Understanding and aligning business objectives
- Business Impact by Microsoft 365 capabilities
- Business Impact Examples
Measuring And Improving Business Impact
There are a few key considerations for determining and measuring business impact.
1. Identify ways Microsoft 365 can drive business impact.
- Just knowing that there is an impact is the first step.
- This whitepaper is meant to address and accelerate this step.
2. Measure the business impact.
- This should be done before Microsoft 365 technologies are implemented, while adoption/usage is being improved, after and during investment activities or as new capabilities are introduced.
- Within this whitepaper, we have provided suggestions for how you might approach measuring some of these business impacts.
3. Take proactive steps based on the measurements and insights shared.
4. Measure the business impact.
5. Repeat steps 1-4.
Gain a greater understanding of these key consideration for determining and measuring business impact in our whitepaper.
Understand And Align Your Business Objectives
For a technology investment to be relevant and for key stakeholders to care about that technology, it is critical to show that the technology positively impacts helping realize important business objectives.
It is often challenging to map the technology solutions and uses we have for technology to business objectives. This is difficult for two key reasons. The first reason is that most business objectives are not specific enough, clear enough, or detailed enough. The second reason is that it can be difficult to visualize the relationship in a way that key stakeholders will immediately recognize.
The image above is a visual example of how these platitudes (or meaningless objectives) might break down into something that has meaning to the organization and also an example of the insight waiting for you in our whitepaper.
Business Impact By Microsoft 365 Capabilities
This subsequent section will outline examples of business impact and how they correlate to key apps and services provided by Microsoft 365.
At this time, we have mapped examples and correlations between the following technologies:
Discover our mapped examples and correlations between all of Microsoft 365 in our business impact whitepaper.
Business Impact Examples
The following are categories of business impact that Microsoft 365 influences. We have included suggestions for measuring each one. Our intention with this approach is to help organizations understand that these benefits can be quantified. Also, it may not be as challenging, thanks to the richer availability of data and insights from the Microsoft 365 platform.
Throughout these measurements, it’s important to understand that each customer is unique.
Here are a few high-level suggestions when you calculate your own ROI:
- We often calculate real-world numbers using estimates for the inefficiency of productivity or cost transfer as not every resource that gets time back will be able to apply it to productive benefits for the organization at the same efficiency level.
- Never do single-point estimates. A range is extremely valuable as it communicates confidence. If it helps, consider creating a low, medium, and high value for each if a range won't work for your decision criteria. Even with further discounting for risk, if the low value is a favorable investment with a good return, that should be enough for the business decision.
- Measuring over time is important. We are cautious about doing multi-year ROI calculations where we don't discount the benefit over time since digital patterns, industry patterns, and your own employee patterns change over time.
- Keep track of all your assumptions. If someone disagrees with your calculations or is not confident in them, you can always input different assumptions or let them experiment with your model (Excel is great for this). Disagree with the suggested salary or cost of the employee? Just change those values to create more variations or professional perspectives on the ROI parameters.
Isn’t It Time You Understand the Impact You Are Having?
All corporate champions of Microsoft 365 deployment want to prove how the technology can pull its financial weight. The path to achieving this lies in understanding the variables that impact ROI evaluation.
Some of the metrics discussed in our whitepaper may vary based on how you use Microsoft 365, but the economic principles remain the same. The economic principles boiled down to: Identify the business value generated by Microsoft 365 deployments and measure it against the costs of implementing these technologies or improving their usage.
Uncover what you should be focusing on with the help of our 50+ page whitepaper on measuring the business impact of Microsoft 365.
Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements
Microsoft Inspire 2021 was another incredible global event that brought us some interesting and exciting announcements from Microsoft. If you haven’t had a chance, be sure to review the Microsoft Inspire 2021 Book of News. As a Microsoft Gold Partner across many categories and an active leader in multiple advisory boards and preview programs, the announcements are often not new to our team. However, we wanted to take a moment to highlight a few key announcements that get us the most excited.
Our 3 Favorite Highlights From Microsoft Inspire
With all of the incredible Microsoft applications moving the meter on the advancement of Digital Workplaces everywhere, you might be wondering, what are the top three announcements/updates from this year’s global Microsoft partner event, Microsoft Inspire 2021.
After discussing with our all-star team of Microsoft MVPs and award winners, we are happy to bring our top 3 highlights from Inspire.
1. Richer & More Integrated Employee Experiences
Microsoft is now leading the charge in first-party integration with popular services and products. In addition, they are making it easier for customers and partners like ourselves to integrate these apps and services across the places users already work today, such as within Microsoft Teams, or surfaced contextually through experiences like Microsoft Viva Topics in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Office.
There are now 20+ partners who have rich integration throughout Microsoft Viva experiences.
Combine this with the existing 100+ Microsoft search connectors that make it easier to provide unified search and better search and graph-based experiences. (This 100+ connector number includes 9 first-party connectors from Microsoft for popular systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, File Shares, and more.)
2. More For Less
As a company that runs its business on Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, we are also extremely excited about the richer (and now free) integration that enables us to discuss, engage around, coordinate with and work on Dynamics activities in Microsoft Teams.
Earlier this month, Microsoft made some pretty big announcements on Power Platform pricing that help companies like ours, and hundreds of our customers do more with less as it relates to business applications and solutions. By reducing the licensing costs by half, more companies can enhance digital experiences and provide meaningful applications and automation through Power Apps and Power Automate.
Costs have shifted from $40 to $20 per user per month for Power Apps per users plans, and from $10 per user/app/month to $5 per user/app/month on October 1st. This price change effectively gives already invested customers money back from their budget for more apps and automation. Also, for many who are just getting started, the promotional pricing is a lower initial cost of ownership.
This also impacted Power Portals so if you haven’t looked at them – take another look as the solutions we have been implementing with customers here are often customer or B2B facing and prove that the Power Platform doesn’t just have to be used for internal applications/automation.
Other announcements provide more ways for vendors like us to provide greater discounts or ensure what you buy through the Microsoft marketplace experiences are closer to their costs by reducing their fees from the industry standard of 20% to 3%.
3. Sustainability Initiatives & Making Sustainability More Digitally Accessible
It can be easy to underestimate just how challenging it is for a company to respond and support the important work needed to meet sustainability goals and respond to one of the most urgent crises facing out planet. However, Microsoft certainly made it easier for organizations like ours and many of our customers by releasing a new “Cloud for Sustainability” later this year.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability enables any organization to record, report, reduce, and replace their emissions more easily and effectively as they relate to IT carbon emissions, which is a great forward step. It will be much harder for organizations to avoid tackling, measuring, and working on sustainability if doing so becomes more accessible and easier to manage.
Expanding your knowledge for FREE
If you are looking for more insights into previous or future announcements, keep in mind that not only are we a Microsoft Gold Partner, but our team is comprised of Microsoft MVPs, and board members. We always have time available to share knowledge, insights, and context on Microsoft 365 and Azure that can help organizations like yourselves be more successful.
Or maybe you looking to learn more about the incredible Digital Workplace offerings from Microsoft 365 or how best to implement them? Dive into our library of resources.
Microsoft 365 Intranets
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Microsoft Inspire is a time of learning, discovery, and new and old partnerships. In the spirit of the event, we have put together a tribute to solution partners that inspire us to push the envelope with Microsoft 365 digital workplaces.
If you are looking for the top 3 highlights of the event, take a look at our blog titled "Top 3 Microsoft Inspire Highlights and Announcements" for the details.
Microsoft has Inspired 400K+ Services & Solution Companies, Globally
This partner portfolio is incredibly diverse, and it can be challenging to navigate. We have evaluated and collaborated with hundreds of active Microsoft 365 product companies to ensure our customers get the right fit from the best and brightest Microsoft partners. If you are an incredible organization and we haven’t worked with you as a partner, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Our own leadership team has managed and led dozens of Microsoft Services partners, and when we created 2toLead, we didn’t want to establish another Microsoft consultancy. We wanted to establish an organization that customers, partners, and communities know will do the right thing, go the extra mile, and have been fortunate enough to be called a generous consulting company. If you are looking to join our growing team or know exceptional people, please don’t hesitate to reach out on our LinkedIn postings we have up, as we are always hiring.
Microsoft Is Changing & So Are All Of Us
Microsoft and Microsoft 365 have been pushing the evolution of digital business practices since both of their inceptions. Microsoft 365 has grown a lot since the early years, and it only continues to advance as Teams, and SharePoint active daily users are at all-time highs, with no signs of slowing down.
There are entirely new challenges and opportunities in the Microsoft Power Platform space, with Azure, and in the growing ways, AI and cloud insights provide new ways to work and create business solutions.
It is an incredible time to be a Microsoft partner, and we are thrilled at the rate of innovation, not only because of the opportunities this creates for our customers and partners but also because it helps us re-invent, re-align, and always learn new things.
The 14 Solutions Partners That Inspire Us
Not only has Microsoft done incredible things on its own, but it is also tethered to an incredible partner ecosystem of services and solutions. They have helped Microsoft push the envelope and/or helped to fill in some gaps that a company focusing on the many can’t always afford.
This blog will identify the partners that inspire us, why they inspire us and a brief description of what they do.
These partners include:
- AvePoint
- BA Insights
- CardioLog
- Layer2
- LiveTiles
- Orchestry
- Panagenda
- Powell
- Quest
- Rencore
- ShareGate
- tyGraph
- Tzunami
- Valo
For a little more on each partner, visit our partner page or contact us to discover if they are right for your needs.
AvePoint
AvePoint offers an incredible breadth of products and services that make it easier, and speedier, to accomplish tasks whether your organization is all in with the cloud or in a Hybrid state. These products/services include Cloud Archiving, Cloud Backup, Citizen Services, File Share navigation (from in M365), GroupHub, Cloud Insights, Cloud Management, MyHub, Cloud Governance, Policies & Insights, Cloud Records, Administrator, Archiver, Backup & Restore, Compliance Guardian Platform, Connector, Content Manager, Data Validation, Classification & Protection, Deployment Manager, Discovery Tooling, Enterprise Risk Management, File Share Archiver, Cloud & SharePoint Migration, Governance Automation, Meetings, High Availability, Office Connect, Perimeter, Records, Replicator, Report Center and Storage Manager.
https://twitter.com/AvePoint/status/1415657662226878476
Why they inspire us
AvePoint has incredible breadth in it’s offerings. It is always relevant in today’s Microsoft 365 enterprise strategy discussions. Whether it’s leveraging… MyHub for managing Microsoft 365 workspaces and creating new ones… we are always happy when we see that our customers have invested in AvePoint.
BA Insights
Connect knowledge with seekers, reward questions with results, stop sifting and start asking. BA Insight provides internet-like enterprise search for organizations that want their knowledge to be askable. They do this by providing personalized, intelligent, connected (over 80 enterprise systems), relevant (automated and intelligent meta tagging) and in-app search from anywhere.
https://twitter.com/BAinsight/status/1413209546248556545
Why they inspire us
The power of a modern, intelligent and connected search has often been out of reach for many organizations due to cost, complexity and feasibility. This has fundamentally changed with Microsoft Search, search improvements and incredible ecosystem advances like those led by BA Insight who has created smart search solutions such as connectors for 80+ enterprise systems.
CardioLog
CardioLog Analytics enables organizations to provide in-depth Office 365 analytics, insights, trends, adoption productivity and usage reports, but more importantly makes those analytics easier to engage, enhance and enforce. As an example CardioLog enables you to target users based on behaviour and enforce certain security policies that improve data safeguarding.
Why they inspire us
The way CardioLog approaches adoption is aligned perfectly with the way we encourage organizations to leverage adoption campaigns and a just in time and in place communication approach. Between the way they use analytics with built in tooling for these adoption and communication tactics as well as enforcement is something that differentiates them from some of the other analytic vendors in the marketplace and is one of the big reasons we love working with them.
Layer2
Layer2 leading solutions is the market-leading provider of data integration and document synchronization solutions for the Microsoft Cloud, focusing on Office 365, SharePoint, and Azure. More than 2.500 companies worldwide and regional partners trust in Layer2 products to keep data and files in sync between 100+ systems and apps in the cloud and on-premises.
Why they inspire us
It is almost unbelievable that a synchronization approach to integration like what Layer2 makes easier to accomplish, can provide literally millions of dollars of value in only a few months. From integrating data sources into extranet sites like supplier portals to avoiding complex integration risks and licensing impacts this is one technology you don’t want to miss out on.
LiveTiles
Organizations everywhere look to LiveTiles to provide them with top tier solutions that elevate their SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environments, innovating beyond them, no matter the size of the organization. With some of the world's most recognizable brands using their product, we would love to show you how their revolutionary digital workplace solutions offer broad and deep end-to-end capability to meet the needs of a modern digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/livetiles/status/1415642564779204610
Why they inspire us
Just look at a leading Digital Workplace vendor like LiveTiles. They have explored and assessed the gaps in Microsoft's Intranet platform and provided solutions that build on what Microsoft does well, while challenging and providing intelligently architected solutions where Microsoft falls short. They don't only do that, but they do it in such a way that it makes it easy for customers or companies like ours to further extend and enhance it easily.
Orchestry
Orchestry is a balanced platform composed of adoption tools, engaging templates, controlled provisioning, and empowering self-service to drive usage and adoption success in Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. Orchestry has pioneered a comprehensive governance, adoption and enablement tool for Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams, that delivers control while empowering greater access to all users. They are a fairly new company but have years of knowledge in the companies founders that have been poured back into the solution.
https://twitter.com/OrchestrySoft/status/1414723753779597316
Why they inspire us
What’s incredible is how clever Orchestry’s approach is on making the provisioning or creation process of new Teams and Sites not only easier with excellent templating/automation, but in making the challenge of when to use what easier as well. When you combine this with the ongoing challenge on managing the lifecycle and navigation of these spaces… it’s clear that the Orchestry approach really does make a difference.
Panagenda
Panagenda’s OfficeExpert is a modular solution that significantly improves productivity, end user experience and job satisfaction using unrivaled Office 365 performance measurement and monitoring technology. The insight it can provide can greatly help large scale global customers better manage and understand how Microsoft 365 is being used.
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Why they inspire us
Panagenda understands large global enterprise customer challenges when it comes to Microsoft 365 and for licensing management they have always been easy to recommend, but the signals, monitoring and analytics in teams… especially when comparing against Zoom, Webex or other products/services in your own organization is incredibly valuable.
Powell
Powell Intranet and Teams offers compelling capabilities whether you are looking for newsroom publishing, events management, social communities, knowledge centers, search experiences, employee directories, analytics, better templating, improved navigation, better employee services or better corporate branding. IT departments everywhere are tasked with managing and maintaining their corporate digital workplace. The internal communications, rightfully, wants something enticing and easy-to-use but sometimes those solutions come at a cost. With Powell's intranet solution, IT and internal communications can both get exactly what they want.
https://twitter.com/PowellSoftware/status/1394943545535078406
Why they inspire us
Powell Manager and the Powell approach leans into the gap of effective design and templating that Microsoft hasn't filled by providing an extensible and intuitive experience that automates or simplifies so many things our customers and we as consultants must do to achieve a highly successful digital workplace.
Quest
Quest provides enterprise scale and well-rounded cloud solutions that are ready to take you from platform migration to cloud deployments quickly and effectively. Security and governance are other areas that their solution shines. The company has been around since 1987 and have packed those years of IT knowledge into their latest offerings that cover the breadth of Microsoft 365 services and applications.
https://twitter.com/Quest/status/1415673775077543944
Why they inspire us
Quest has a long history of providing solutions our customers need and their acquisition of Metalogix has further grown their relevant and useful portfolio of Microsoft 365 solutions for us. When it comes to Lotus Notes and a variety of other migration scenarios Quest is always at the top of our customers, and our own list as the vendor to engage for the right end-to-end approach.
Rencore
Rencore is an incredible company that provides governance automation solutions that help you stay in control of Microsoft 365. You can easily identify anomalies and trends that might affect your governance plan for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Azure, and Power Platform and automate the necessary next steps.
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Why they inspire us
Rencore understands the technical complexity of the Microsoft 365 platform. We love Rencore Code (SPCAF) and have used it for years helping our customers analyze and assure code quality when building on SharePoint, Office 365 and Teams. Now we loving the incredible potential of Rencore Governance as it’s focus on the whole of the M365 platform is hard not to love… There aren’t many who offer Power Platform governance improvement and automation alongside Teams and SharePoint while also considering Microsoft Stream, Dynamics and more.
ShareGate
Renown for providing an easy to use tool that has and continues to enable thousands of successful migrations for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. ShareGate is a premier solution in the migration space and can simplify and aid in the complex migration many systems to your Microsoft 365 digital workplace. They are truly the simplest way for IT to succeed with a faster transition to the Microsoft cloud.
Also, monitor your tenant and highlight ways to make it healthier based on the policies you set. Then automate and action those improvements. With many years in the industry, ShareGate, being migration specialists, saw what was happening to digital workplaces after everything had been migrated and set out to solve the issue of management and governance that comes with growth. That is when ShareGate Apricot was born, an IT first solution designed to ensure your organization can rest easy when it comes to some of the most common (and challenging) governance scenarios for Microsoft Teams.
https://twitter.com/sharegatetools/status/1394310410732511233
Why they inspire us
What’s great about ShareGate is that even after so many years of enhancements, new capabilities, and improvements it still is so darn simple to use. For so many organizations they just need an easy to learn, understand and well supported solution for migration and some of the most common management/optimization activities that you need to do and it’s here that ShareGate delivers.
tyGraph
tyGraph uses deep insights into adoption patterns to ensure your KPI’s are being met, or what to do about those that aren’t. With tyGraph you can quickly find key influencers, subject matter experts and trends to incorporate into your digital transformation and improvement strategy. We find tyGraph to not only be accurate and useful but actionable when it comes to their analytics.
https://twitter.com/tyGraphTweets/status/1415391887561789446
Why they inspire us
What is great about tyGraph is that they extract every bit of insight possible from the Microsoft 365 platform today and then they provide the intelligence to make many of those insights more actionable. When you think of all the audited activities in Microsoft 365 that is an incredible feat.
Tzunami
Simplify your data migration with the help of Tzunami's migration tooling. They have targeted solutions that enable you to automate and simplify migrating from confluence, eRoom, Documentum, LiveLink, DocuShare, eDocs, Hummingbird, HPE Content Manager, Lotus Notes, Atlassian Confluence, Egnyte, BIM 360 and many more.
Why they inspire us
Tzunami is a critical partner for so many migration scenarios where they are not only the most relevant choice, but they are often a choice that saves hundreds of hours of manual or custom migration work for us.
Valo
Valo focuses on a beautiful UI/UX experience with the ability to deploy quickly, since most of the staple features and experiences are baked into the solution. With a variety of solutions that are directly integrated into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, Valo's digital workplace products might be the perfect fit for your organization. From their main intranet solution, Valo Intranet, to their ideation solution, Valo Ideas, they are ready to strengthen your digital workplace.
https://twitter.com/valointranet/status/1415415869220421634
Why they inspire us
What is great about Valo is how effectively they have simplified some of the big Intranet challenges, and done so in a way that is accessible and extremely cost competitive. It's well built and they are constantly innovating where they see opportunities to further enhance the Microsoft digital workplace offering.
Continuing to inspire
Just like our partners, we continue to push the boundaries of what is deemed possible with Microsoft 365. We hope you have found this blog has opened your eyes to the incredible solutions outside of Microsoft that work with it to improve.
If you are looking for more information on the capabilities of Microsoft 365, we are sure you will find one of our free resources insightful and full with actionable information.
SharePoint and Teams Sprawl
eBook | Learn about the most common SharePoint and Microsoft Teams Sprawl issues and how to solve them. Also, gain insight into how Sprawl impacts both the end-user and IT.
Microsoft 365 Adoption
Explore the benefits of an Microsoft 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today, and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
Digital Communication & Collaboration Advantages
eBook | Learn about the digital communication and collaboration advantages provided by a Microsoft 365 Intranet and digital workplace in our eBook.
Microsoft 365 Business Impact
Find out how to identify and measure the business value Microsoft 365 provides with examples and advice on Microsoft 365 reporting and metrics.
Children's Non-Profit Organization Sees Advantages of Digital...
| Industry | Non-Profit Social Services |
| Org Size | 100+ |
| Technologies | Microsoft 365 Teams SharePoint Power Platform |
Non-profit community organization funded by the Government, legally mandated to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
When the organization was looking to transform how they communicate and collaborate with staff and social workers, they partnered with 2toLead to ensure success. Their team used a legacy Intranet platform for sharing essential links and day-to-day relevant information. Another integral repository was the file server, which also needed to migrate to SharePoint Online. After an initial step in the right direction, moving from a Lotus Notes environment to Microsoft 365, they stayed committed to supporting their workforce during the transition.
As a non-profit organization, agility and efficiency are paramount to empower their team to reach as many people who need them as possible. The organization had the vision to provide the right tools, proper training and communication to support its staff. 2toLead was there to make it happen by leveraging their team of Microsoft 365 champions.
Establishing what the advantages of digital transformation mean for them
Our journey began in October 2019 by meeting with their IT and Administrative Services team. We focused on creating the foundational pieces and a new tool or channel that compelled users to visit, interact, and get information. Their staff looks at the Intranet as the source of critical information, raising the stakes of its importance.
At the time, Microsoft Teams was being piloted by their IT department to evaluate its capabilities and to identify how both Teams and SharePoint would complement each other. A question that's on the minds of many organizations today.
The building blocks of their Intranet
Our first release focused on providing the foundation for an Intranet that supported the central communication and collaboration functions of their team. As the organization had recently embraced the Microsoft 365 platform for email, leveraging SharePoint Online to build the foundation for their Intranet was a natural choice due to the strengths of a connected digital workplace.
With an agile set of workshops to cover our information architecture, navigation, and search capabilities, we confirmed our requirements for the new Intranet.
As part of our discussions, we reviewed the governance and life cycle planning aspects relevant to creating new communities using the platform. The use of wireframes and mockups were essential to iterate and confirm our requirements for visual impact faster.
Planning and executing the migration
With the foundation in place and the Intranet platform built, we rolled up our sleeves and dug into the file shares.
The team assessed the various file shares provided to staff for individual use (home drives), department level, and global use. The team used the gathered information to ensure the right documents were migrated.
Personal files: the team documented clear instructions for employees to move their data to OneDrive for Business.
More extensive data repositories: our migration consultants supported the team and migrated their information from their shared drives to SharePoint Online.
Adapting to the new normal with targeted training
During our journey, the Coronavirus pandemic brought additional challenges that compelled the non-profit to act fast and accelerate their plans for adoption, particularly for Microsoft Teams. Rolling out Microsoft Teams was vital to uphold their principles of service excellence and collaboration in the face of an unprecedented change to how work happens.
The Microsoft Teams rollout took priority, and from a technical perspective, it was simple to deploy. However, employees struggled to adapt to the new environment and needed additional support to remain productive. Internally, the staff received initial training and supporting resources, but they wanted to take it a step further.
Their team decided to provide more targeted training. With the help and information provided by them, 2toLead delivered a tailored training program focused on best practices and collaboration boosters. This empowered employees to use Microsoft 365 and Teams to their fullest potential. Additionally, given their recent transition to a new email and calendaring system, we emphasized tips and best practices for managing email, scheduling meetings, and organizing calendar events.
Taking the first steps towards business process automation
Accelerated by the new normal, and to facilitate critical business processes, we identified areas that needed automation. The Power Platform was a solid choice as the technology to underpin the efforts. The team had just begun their business transformation journey and needed a partner to walk the path and not only implement the critical business processes, but also acquire the knowledge internally by being part of the process.
To meet this goal, they partnered with 2toLead to automate a process for distributing vouchers to families in need.
The voucher administration process is a critical process that involved various departments, automation, and data sources within and outside the realm of Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.
With the actors, their actions, and the flow of the system documented, the team joined forces and proceeded to build three Power Apps to meet the needs of the various actors, ranging from social workers, supervisors, administrators, and delivery drivers.
Along the way, our 2toLead consultants and their Administrative Services Team participated in the design and development sessions to create each app. This approach allowed for training the team as we developed the Power Apps and Power Automate Flows needed for each step of the process.
Leveraging data from on-premises data sources
A critical business need derived from the analysis was to read client data and present it using Power Apps. This data resided on-premises. Given the nature of its sensitivity, we needed a secure and efficient solution that allowed this data to be exposed to our Power App users while ensuring it would remain available at any time.
To meet this need, our architect team proposed a Hybrid Data Architecture model. This model leverages Common Data Service to store client information and update it regularly. The scenario called for using an on-premises data access gateway to connect to the SQL Server Instance on-premises. With the information now stored in a cloud entity, it was ready to be leveraged by Power Apps, or Power Automate flows that required it.
To complement the architecture, we also considered the use of Power BI to report on data from cloud sources such as our data entities and on-premises data residing in SQL Server.
What’s next for the organization?
With a solid foundation in place to communicate and collaborate with modern tools, and the resources to train new and existing employees, their team is well-positioned to invest further in making the operation more secure, efficient and adaptable to the needs of the organization.
The knowledge gained from building their first apps in the Power Platform will boost their confidence in the platform to continue optimizing and automating business processes and simplifying their reporting solutions to bring data and actions to the front lines. This experience, in turn, will contribute to supporting the organization in continuing to fulfill its mission to protect children and youth from abuse and neglect.
The power of a partner on your journey
For many organizations, the world of Microsoft 365 is uncharted territory. Experiencing business transformation takes an intentional partnership with the business's knowledge and the expertise to optimize and implement technology in a way that meets your business outcomes. Our team is passionate and strives to work together to make the journey much more comfortable to walk along. Let us join your organization's journey towards digital transformation and business process optimization together.
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