How to Ensure Microsoft 365 Continues to Deliver Value Post-Adoption

As we race towards Windows 7 reaching ‘end of life’ for Microsoft's extended support, and Office 2010 reaching end of life for mainstream support, more and more companies are making the leap to cloud and adopting Microsoft 365. The platform has many advantages, helping organisations become modern workplaces by offering productivity and security benefits, and reduced costs. However, just like with any cloud service, management and optimisation post-adoption is a constant concern for businesses; guaranteeing increased productivity while remaining cost efficient can be a difficult hurdle to overcome.

After having adopted Microsoft 365, businesses will have lots of great new features at their fingertips to boost staff productivity, like document management in SharePoint and a centralised hub for teamwork in Microsoft Teams. However, they often find themselves with no real roadmap on how these functionalities can be used to their full potential. Our Unified Cloud Management (UCM) for Microsoft 365 managed service can help to alleviate this uncertainty by ensuring expert and certified support is on hand 24/7.

This service includes help with the escalation path to Microsoft Premier Support, health monitoring of Microsoft 365 applications to identify any possible issues, as well as unlimited functional and technical support. Our team can also introduce teams to new features through live webinars and online training platforms, and provide insight into who is using which features, encouraging adoption or teaching best practice where needed.

Even after establishing the ways that Microsoft 365 can boost business productivity and efficiency, comes the challenge of managing costs. Cost optimisation can be tricky to tackle alone, but UCM for Microsoft 365 can offer a helping hand. Not only does our Microsoft SLA monitoring mean we can negotiate a better deal for businesses based on real uptime from MS Cloud services, we can also offer advice on the best licensing option.

As part of the workload management service, UCM for Microsoft 365 can help companies determine their licensing position – looking at usage to understand which functions aren’t being used enough and which are used more than expected. Other ways the service can help include looking at historical usage data for to provide prognoses for future license and workload usage, admin reduction and savings on ticket costs as issues are dealt with by the team.