Office 365, or O365 as it is more commonly known, is much more than simply a cloud–based replacement of Email, Word and Excel—it’s a comprehensive and complete workplace productivity experience, accessible anywhere, from any device.
In line with the other cloud services offered by Microsoft, O365 is continuously updated with new features and capabilities via the cloud, which come quickly and relentlessly. Enterprise IT is now faced with a new challenge:
How can they take full advantage of their O365 investment, and still deliver a high-quality and modern employee experience?
An investment in business productivity
With O365, companies are not simply buying a straightforward upgrade; rather, they are making an investment in their workforce’s productivity and everyday digital experiences. And if employees are not using the multitude of new features due to lack of awareness, access, or satisfaction, then you are wasting time, resources and ultimately money on O365, when it could actually help you save thousands of dollars and countless hours of lost productivity.
In essence, by disregarding the health, usage and adoption of their O365 services, IT teams are consciously hampering Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and business returns.
For this reason, IT needs to start taking action on the most important measures of O365 ROI – adoption and satisfaction; that is, ensuring employees are successfully using new features and updates and improving their overall DEX and productivity. But before this can happen, they need to provide a healthy O365 landscape, ensuring all devices are migrated to the latest version, updated with the latest features and that there are zero performance lapses.
Take back control: migration, health and remediation
For large organizations, there are significant IT challenges related to O365’s service-based approach. Most notably, the continual management of both feature and security updates with O365 affect IT’s ability to control the service’s lifecycle. This burdens IT with the complex task of continuously monitoring tens of thousands of different and decentralized devices to ensure they are all updated and synchronised with the latest versions and features. Without the right tools and processes in place, support teams will encounter increased overhead and productivity loss.
So how can they prevent this from happening?
Visibility and actionable insight.
Visibility is first—answering who, what, where and how in a single, centralized platform—and then showing real-time insight over technical performance and employee sentiment. With a variety of data, metrics, and dashboards, the Nexthink platform gives IT support contextual oversight into their O365 landscape.
But data is useless if it’s not actionable.
Based on key scores and insight, Nexthink then allows IT to streamline device migration and proactively fix performance or satisfaction degradations using a range of remote actions and automatic remediations. With the right visibility and tools to take action, enterprise IT can keep control over O365’s new feature releases and increase ROI.
Understanding sentiment and accelerating adoption
Having a healthy O365 environment is only one piece of the puzzle as employees also need to be aware of and adopt new updates and features as they are introduced. Easier said than done. Indeed, the service-based approach has rendered traditional online or classroom style training obsolete, as it is nearly impossible to efficiently train an entire organization about all the new O365 feature updates due to the frequency at which they are arriving.
What modern IT departments need is the ability to monitor service usage and adoption on a continuous basis. With Nexthink, IT can then detect employees who are not using a new feature—or using it incorrectly—and then send targeted engagement campaigns to those specific users to inform them about it and, if necessary, train them. In addition, IT can also monitor employees’ satisfaction levels for specific O365 services and, in the event of a low score, get in contact with them to understand and fix any issues.
By taking such an employee-centric approach with Nexthink, IT can not only ensure that employees are adopting and using O365’s services effectively, but are also happy and satisfied with them.
Don’t waste your O365 opportunities
O365 is a powerful solution, filled with robust features to empower a more modern, collaborative and productive workplace. However, if employees don’t have access to said features—or worst, have access but are not aware of them—companies hinder their DEX and bottom line.
Using Nexthink’s employee-centric approach, combining monitoring, remediation and engagement capabilities, IT can keep control over a rapidly changing landscape and enhance employees’ O365 dexterity and agility. With improved productivity, reduced overhead and satisfied employees, IT support can take back control of their investment in O365.
For a complete overview of the initiative, watch the Office 365 on-demand webinar.
For current Nexthink customers, you can download the Office 365 Library Pack right here.
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