Modern Workplace
To effectively operate in today’s business environment requires tools that simplify the process of sharing information and streamlining collaboration between employees. SharePoint, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams have proven themselves a worthy solution, utilized by companies, departments and clients across the globe—each implementing different platforms and devices. Our Modern Workplace team will collaborate with you on the right solution to help integrate your data and infrastructure to best support company-wide collaboration and productivity.
The “G” Drive (a.k.a. Document Management)
For you, it could be the F drive or the Q drive. But no matter the letter, your documents
Further, you’re not taking advantage of cloud backups, the ability to work from anywhere, nor the security and confidence of a robust cloud storage infrastructure. As a result, your data is at risk. Moreover, your business isn’t as competitive an employer, service provider or vendor, as it could be.
Objective
Migrate your documents and files into modern cloud technologies. Enable a more secure, accessible, searchable work environment in order to be more competitive to prospective employees and clients, and less susceptible to security breaches and compliance liabilities.
Solution Starters:
- Consider a Teams Readiness Assessment
- Build a Teams Proof of Concept
- Learn more about Teams and/or SharePoint
Process Skunkworks or Inconsistency (a.k.a Workflows)
When it comes to expense reports, vacation requests, order fulfillment, employee or customer onboarding/offboarding, or some other process, you find yourself in one of two camps:
- You do it somewhat consistently, but without [insert priceless employee name here], all that would fall apart – no one else knows how it’s done. The process isn’t documented.
- It’s not done all that consistently, and there’s no way for you to check up on it besides speaking directly to whoever’s presently responsible.
Objective
Build a repeatable, maintainable, accessible process that is self-documenting, appropriately automated and is as self-service and efficient as possible.
Use the elements of the Microsoft Stack that most suit your goals – whether that’s SharePoint, Teams, PowerApps, Flow, Dynamics, Azure services or a combination of tools.
Solution Starters
A Microsoft Power Platform Workshop is a great way to evaluate PowerApps and Flow’s ability to automate some of your processes.
If you have a process identified that needs some work, a Project Charter is a good way to move forward clarifying requirements and specifying the solution.
Upgrade in Communication Services
Your company is experiencing
Your company still has an old phone system that requires a PBX. You’re paying higher costs for landlines, and there is no consistent collaboration tool or protocol in the company.
Objective
One collaborative environment that includes:
- Easy and intuitive document management
- Sharing, saving, collaborating – single iteration
- Instant messaging
- Calling
- Video calling
- Organization within my group or team
Solution Starters:
- Communication Discovery & Assessment
- Communications Planning & Execution / Roadmap
Move to Microsoft Teams
You are interested in leveraging Microsoft Teams to replace your current aging phone system and integrate IM and collaboration into one solution.
- You may have heard about Microsoft Teams, and want to learn more about how it could work at your company. You want to understand the licensing.
- Your company may be using
Slack, or seeking a similar solution to Slack, but you are interested in learning more about Microsoft Teams since you are already an Office365 user.
Objective
Leverage Microsoft Teams and proper Microsoft licensing to build a collaboration protocol where voice, IM
Solution Starters:
- Cloud Readiness Assessment
- Collaboration Assessment and Discovery
- MSFT TEAMs Deployment Plan
- CSP (Licensing)
- Migration
Lost productivity from outage
You want to avoid lost productivity in the event of a disaster. When systems are all on-premise and your office has an outage or other disaster, employees are unable to access company documents, email, instant message, etc., negatively impacting collaboration, productivity
Objective
Have a strategic fail-over and redundant backup system in place that utilizes best practices in hybrid and cloud solutions to keep email, phone and IM working in the event of a disaster or power outage.
Solution Starters:
- Communications Discovery & Assessment
- Evaluation of current state phone/email systems
- Recommendations for Remediation to align with best practice
- Future state recommendations
- Communications Roadmap
- Project or program that results from the discovery
Too Vested / Disillusioned With SharePoint
SharePoint has been around a long time. You committed to it years ago, and your people just don’t like SharePoint. They find it too hard to use, too “clicky,” overly complicated, or detailed. Further, you haven’t upgraded it in years— nor moved to the cloud—because you’re concerned that will break all your investments in customization.
Objective
Evolve your collaboration infrastructure to better serve your users.
Whether that involves a SharePoint upgrade, a migration to the cloud, or even a new approach with Teams, you must overcome your current system’s limitations and build a shared vision for more efficient, effective collaboration.
Solution Starters:
- A Teams Readiness Assessment or a SharePoint Cloud Migration Assessment can help address concerns about breaking your existing customizations
- Consider a Teams Workshop to familiarize your team with the capabilities of Microsoft’s fastest growing cloud collaboration platform.
Cloud Migration
Your SharePoint Infrastructure is hosted on-premise, in a co-located data center, or on IaaS servers. As a result, your tuning and maintenance expenses are high. Plus, you are unable to take advantage of the latest features of SharePoint without significant delay compared to an Office365 or SharePoint Online tenant.
You may also experience challenges authenticating with an on-premise Active Directory/security infrastructure working properly in off-premise/cloud access scenarios. On-premise scenarios can also involve higher licensing costs and perhaps depreciated and difficult to support customizations.
Objective
Lower maintenance expense and improve the reliability and functionality of your SharePoint infrastructure by migrating your content to SharePoint Online, and address needed customizations from your existing SharePoint configuration(s).
Optionally, you may also aim to deploy Azure Active Directory and lower your SharePoint licensing expense.
Solution Starters
A Cloud Migration Assessment can clarify your expectations and help avoid unnecessary risks and/or down-time associated with a migration to the cloud.
Aging Email Environment
You have an aging email environment where you experience productivity losses and potential impacts to your competitive advantage. Today’s newer/updated email systems are much more sophisticated and supportive of real time collaboration. Moreover, your current system puts you at risk for security breaches and dependence on third-party applications to maintain a secure environment.
Maintenance costs are rising as your IT department is spending time to run backups on your on-premise environment. Plus, this process puts you at risk for lost data. You fear your system may fail altogether.
Objective
Move to a cloud-based solution for managing email, which affords you access to best practice for security, increased and facilitated collaboration, and remote user integration.
Solution Starters:
- Communication Discovery & Assessment
- Communications Planning & Execution / Roadmap
Upgrade in Email and Exchange Management
At times, you experience high cost and resource impact managing company’s Exchange environment. Resources are tight and time can be better spent. You are not leveraging new licensing bundles available to serve the company and your users.
Objective
An environment where licensing is leveraged to save costs, increase user productivity and improve collaboration. Mail management is easy and minimizes impact on your resources.
Solution Starters:
- Office 365 Email Migration
- CSP and Licensing Improvements
- Cloud Readiness Assessment
Our collaboration experts can help you streamline your processes and boost productivity. Let’s work together!
Relevant Blog Posts
5 Best Practices to Working from Home with Microsoft Teams
by Michelle Holbrook, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Uncommon Solutions It is likely true that, like so many organizations, you are exploring some new definition of normal in the current work from home realities that have come with COVID-19 stay at home orders...
The Do’s and Don’ts of Video Conferencing
by Dallen Campbell, Vice President of Strategy and Architecture for Uncommon Solutions As more and more workplaces transition to being remote, I would like to share some simple recommendations to make working digitally a success. With meetings moving entirely online,...
TAKING THE POWER OF THE CLOUD INTO 2020: 7 Reasons to Migrate Now
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