Maximize the Microsoft 365 Subscription in small businesses
In 2017 we realized many users of Microsoft Office subscribed to ‘Office 365’ without understanding the power of the virtual company they were paying for.
Microsoft 365 (Still named Office at that time) made it easy to demonstrate why it would be worth investing in setting up the Cloud in a professional way. All business owners we spoke, to start with wanted their email with their business domain, finally setup in an easy to manage central location. It wasn’t hard for them to realize how easy and safe file storing & sharing would be if that centralized storage would be in a common location instead of their personal OneDrive. And through that it wasn’t hard for them to discover Sharepoint if only to consolidate business information.
This journey started with a 2 partner business. They had been using their personal OneDrive as document archive sharing password and user. We made the projects added value for the businesses to become aware of the issues of privacy and security so having access using 2FA and logging in with your own account was a welcome improvement. They allowed us to provide in a basic training a bachelor degree staff member would easily absorb. In this training history and basic technical aspect were taught ‘to cure button anxiety’ and at the same time gain a profound understanding of risks, and better jet, of the existence of many, many risk mitigating techniques and protocols that allow for great user-freedom and conscious security at the same time. In 2020 Teams truly entered the arena.
The best project so far was done with a company of 7 internal staff members working with 15 to 25 external teachers, providing online training for schools. We trained a key-user in the company with the trusted foundation we developed to explain the WWW through which all resources, users and devices connect. Next we collaborated in the design of a virtual company in Sharepoint in which departments like management, finance & legal, examination, marketing and more got an intranet-portal and logical document storage. At the same time M365 was made the DNS provider impacting central management for their Online learning systems. As we could also roll out implementation of Exchange for easy email management. With Sharepoint as the companies backend view Teams was the logical connection to external collaborators.
The organisation is still growing and our trained super-user is now handling all IT related projects within the organisation with great confidence.
