How to Get to Business Value with Office 365

Believe it or not, Office 365 was announced way back in October 2010. Before that, there was BPOS. From these humble beginnings in commodity services, Microsoft has brought to market a rich platform and ecosystem that can change the way your business operates.

Yet, many get stuck with commodity services. Email gets moved into Exchange Online, Skype for Business gets turned on and maybe some files make it into SharePoint Online or OneDrive. Upon close inspection, very little value is returned to the business.

The pitch for selling Office 365 used to be administrative overhead and reduced complexity, which was true enough. This impacted the productivity of just one group - IT, reducing their overhead. The story has transformed, as Microsoft has. Office 365 can impact the business, and IT needs to get it there.

Understanding that the long term goal is business value from Office 365 means that you've already made a momentous shift in thinking. Keep an eye on that long term prize as we go through a sample journey to business value with Office 365.

Starting with Commodity

There's a reason most Office 365 migrations start with email. Identity is the foundation of the platform and your email address is your identity. Also, email is strictly a commodity service, one with little true customization on-premises, despite any critical business processes built around it (or protections in place). Email is built on standards and whether you run it on-premises or in the cloud, those standards don't change (at least not much).

At this phase, a lot of parity, especially around security is brought to bear. Subtle enhancements may be added, like MFA (please just turn on MFA) or even chat (historically Skype for Business locked down to internal only, or now Teams). Largely though, the skills you need to enable identities and hybrid email are throw away. I recommend engaging Microsoft FastTrack (free depending on your licensing) and/or a partner to help you with these first steps. For a complete review of what FastTrack can offer, check the Overview.

Something to consider at this stage is to start a parallel effort to enable Azure. Identities are core to all of Microsoft clouds and once you have them syncing properly for the commodity stage, it can be a great time to start going down the other core enablement pieces of Azure to further enhance collaboration and productivity (ie. you will be ahead of the game at the end, see more below).

This first foray into Office 365 isn't too exciting and is usually fast and furious. Office Pro Plus may sneak it's head up here, which is another consideration. When this stage is over, new questions come up around external sharing and content security. It is in the second phase where many projects (and best intentions) linger, but I'm here to show you the way forward.

Moving into Advanced Collaboration Workloads

Email is great, but many companies initially choose Office 365 to move collaboration conversations into more appropriate workstreams (ie. email isn't for everything). Despite this, few companies know where to go after email. File sharing is the next logical step with file server migrations leading the charge, but typically security concerns lead to locking down external access on the light touch end to a complete content classification strategy on the extreme end.

If content protection and DLP are serious considerations (or regulatory requirements), a great first step could be to create sample labels that protect documents to domain users only and protecting sensitive data more intelligently (PII, certain documents or contracts, etc.). A follow up would be to leave external sharing off, at least until that decision can be reviewed later.

If you do want to migrate this data, Microsoft has a number of tools to help migrate from traditional file shares into SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. FastTrack can perform Data Migrations into the platform (requirements here). There are also tons of partners, who stand ready to help, as well as two free tools - the SharePoint Migration Tool and Known Folder Move for OneDrive for Business.

If you don't want to migrate data, you can enable new services rapidly and have your users add new data to the platform.

Take a look at this graphic and think about different workflows in your business and what can be turned on without data migration. Consider on-premises data a 'future migration' as people move their work into Office 365. Now, you can't force any of these on everyone because not everyone (and every business process) works together. You should plan to enable all of these features in the long run though, especially as the collaborative flow often touches each piece of the circle.

Enabling these technologies involves proper planning, end user communication and training, which FastTrack and a training partner can also help you with. There are several Office 365 adoption programs available online to help you, including community driven efforts, as well as free end user training.

As you start interacting with the platform, you send signals around how you work. Office 365 leverages this data, analyzes it and surfaces it back to you in MyAnalytics. There is immense business value that you can glean here. For example, stuck on that recurring meeting, but constantly sending emails? The data will tell you to drop that meeting, allowing you to take your time back!

Towards the end of this phase, you may start considering secure mobile access to the platform. Many customers choose to allow the mobile apps and control them with Microsoft Intune to keep data within the platform via Mobile Application Management and Mobile Device Management.

Providing Business Value

Our platform is now securely rolled out for both internal devices and possibly even BYOD. Productivity is up and people are collaborating more fluidly and naturally than in the past. At this phase, you can start enhancing security if you haven't done so yet (think additional lock down controls, more enhanced and granular DLP protections and reporting, Audit Logs and automation, opening external sharing, etc.). Still, all of these things are IT improving the service.

We can now start thinking about how the business can use these platforms to impact business processes and ultimately, the bottom line. All businesses have processes that are their uncaptured IP (ie. how they get things done), but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be improved tremendously.

The last stage of the Office 365 journey is uncovering these use cases across your organization. Determine where in the platform they can be solved and then use Flow, PowerApps and Power BI to build automation, alerting, workflows, reports, and more around those business processes.

At this point, the commodity collaboration tools (Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, etc.) become a platform on which you can orchestrate business solutions. Not only do these Microsoft tools become the platform, but so does any internal or external system that you can connect to through the various data connections.

This is really where the power of Office 365 comes into play. If you get started and find you need help with these Power Tools, a great place to start is the Power Users community.

If you've started another team down the road with Azure, by this time they should be fully enabled to extend the functionality even further with LogicApps and other marketplace solutions. At the end of this phase, you will have enabled your business users to become citizen developers around workflows and business processes. You are also well poised to enhance the business with additional functionality with Azure and a modern way of operating.

The End

Is this the end? Well, not really. There will always be improvements to the platform and as your business grows, it will uncover new efficiencies and processes that require revisiting. A continuous state of innovation is where you want to be, but you can't get there without patience, structure, security and planning. The path outlined in this article is just one sample way to go about it, but the end state should always be the same - providing business value.

Have you taken the road to Office 365 yet? I'd love to hear about your roadblocks and challenges in the comments!

About Matthew Sekol:

Matthew Sekol is an Account Technology Strategist in Financial Services for Microsoft with a degree from Penn State in English. With a mix of creativity and a passion for computers, he has a unique perspective on life, business and technology.

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