Out Of Office: Health Check

So far in this series, we've covered setting expectations as well as migrating to Office 365. Now that your organization is up and running on the new platform, how do you measure your organization's health? Are you running as efficiently as you can, or were? Are there areas that you are being wasteful with? In this post, we'll cover some steps that you can take in order to give your organization a health check. WHAT IS BEING USED? One of the great things about Office 365 is that there is no shortage of packages to choose from. Whether you are looking to host a single email account, or if you need to host your entire communications platform--including phones--there are packages that will fit. But how can you tell if you have "right-sized" your licenses? Office 365 has an easy to understand activity report. Pulling up this report will let you see statistics on a lot of the services being offered. For example, you can see who is using OneDrive and how much data they are storing. You can also see how popular Skype for Business is amongst your users. At a high-level, you can take this list and see who is or isn't using these features. Depending on the needs and the features, users might be able to be shifted to a lower tiered plan. Given the range of prices for the various plans, this can yield fairly significant savings. WHY ISN'T SOMETHING BEING USED Taking the same data above, you can find a list of folks who aren't using particular products or features. This is a perfect opportunity to find out why they aren't taking advantage of their license's full potential. Is it because they don't need the product/server? Maybe they aren't aware that they can access it. Or, maybe they don't know how to use it. Taking this approach can be a great way to figure out what users need training and in what areas. Given how frequently Microsoft is adding new features to Office 365, it is also a great way to see adoption rates. Using this data, you can start to develop training schedules. Maybe once a month you can offer training sessions on some of the lesser-used areas. The great thing is, you will be able to easily tell if your training is useful by looking at the usage metrics again in the future. ENSURING VALUE One of the key points I highlighted back in the first post of this series was the value that this migration can bring to an enterprise. When planning out projects, we do so anticipating that we will get value out of this. Actually measuring the value after a migration is just as important. If reports and studies come back showing that your organization is, in fact, utilizing the new platform to its full potential, then great! If not, then you need to identify why not, and take the opportunity to fix it.