How can we help?

It goes without saying that Covid-19 has impacted businesses in an exceptional way, and business continuity plans have had to be implemented (or created!) in record time.

The new normal?

Most of our customers at CompanyNet are already using Office 365 in some capacity, which gives the basic capability to support remote working.

We are in the fortunate position of not only being able to continue operating CompanyNet's business, but also using our experience of Office 365 administration and adoption to directly support companies in these turbulent times.

It often requires more than just an O365 subscription to completely enable a user to work from home, and we've seen organisations react to achieve this for their employees. This could vary from turning on additional Office 365 workloads, setting up virtual meeting rooms for leadership teams to collaborate, through to building and distributing hundreds of devices to provide access to corporate resources.

Enabling Microsoft Teams has been a common step and this allows users to communicate internally or with external partners and maintain connections through voice or chat. Most organisations who were already using Skype for Business would already have to plan for migration to Teams in the next 12 months, however in many companies this has been fast-tracked to completion in a matter of weeks.

Supporting your remote workforce

Users operating in this new remote-working world need appropriate training and support to succeed. CompanyNet have been working with organisations in the last few weeks to provide help here and take some of the load off overburdened IT and Operations teams.

This support can be product 'deep dive' training sessions delivered over Teams; providing 'community support' by monitoring and responding to questions and issues on Yammer, or helping Learning and Development set up a Microsoft Learning Pathways portal to showcase Microsoft training content complemented by the organisations own material,

The great benefit is that all of these services can be designed and delivered remotely and takes almost no time to set up with minimal dependencies on IT teams, so the value is immediate.

Don't forget about the governance

Once the reactive element of enabling an organisation to work remotely on Office 365 is over, the focus needs to move quickly to strategic governance and administration.

Microsoft have designed Office 365 to be a (relatively) intuitive platform with defaults set to prioritise user self-service over centralised control with regards to creating new Teams and Office 365 Groups. This is a huge benefit for users, but in large organisations, it can rapidly become a pain point for administrators with 'information sprawl', duplication and a lack of oversight being the end result.

Rather than simply locking everything down, the most effective approach is to understand the configurations which are available and chose the best option(s) to balance user functionality with the organisations' governance requirements.

This will typically cover items such as creation and ownership of Teams/SharePoint Sites, the Information Sensitivity related to this content and how the information should be retained. Defining policies such as not storing business data in OneDrive also avoid future issues with data loss.

Features such as Conditional Access and Managed Device policies can also be included so that the resulting output is an Operating Model for the platform.

This provides a blueprint for the way the organisation works with Office 365 and will become the reference for activities such as cloud file migration, or improving information audit / compliance capabilities.

CompanyNet work with customers to help define and implement these operating models.

For smaller customers, we're happy to take on the administration directly but more commonly we collaborate with an enterprise's IT or Information Compliance teams to develop the governance model and support the implementation alongside their own experts.

Although every organisation is different, our experience with Office 365 allows us to bring a proven approach to quickly establish a current baseline and map out the steps required to move to the desired state to meet the organisations needs.

Where we can help

Many companies have accelerated their cloud migration strategy to meet business continuity needs and as a result there is a possibility that gaps exist, or additional support is required.

We spend an enormous amount of time in the details of Office 365 and Microsoft 365, whether this is digging into the functionality beyond the marketing, understanding licensing or keeping an eye on the roadmaps.

The result is that CompanyNet are well-placed to meet an organisations' needs with Office 365, whether it's short engagement to set up a training portal for user support, a longer partnership to develop a information governance framework or to improve adoption.

Get in touch should any of the above be useful services for your organisation, or you want to know more.