How to drive Office 365 adoption with an Intranet Portal Structure

Many organizations have gone to Office 365 – most because they saw the strategic value of a Cloud Solution and other because, well, Microsoft made them a deal they couldn’t refuse.

The bottom line for all businesses is that it makes dollars and sense to transform from a Client-side model with expensive servers to a Cloud-based solution.  They have effectively eliminated the need to manage and install countless updates on so many different Client versions of Office.  These companies give their employees greater capabilities and accessibility across all devices….anywhere… anytime.

That is…if they use it.  The fastest Ferrari in the world can’t do much if you don’t learn to drive stick shift.  We are finding that while a lot of people have moved to Office 365, in reality, their users haven’t adopted and are using the crutches of Client-based programs. 

So now, you are paying for the cloud and the clients!?!  Why should you pay for something you are not even using?

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Overwhelming your users

Getting your users to fully adopt Office 365 online can be overwhelming.  There's a lot of “stuff” that is thrown at users in the “Waffle” and everyday Microsoft is adding more.

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All of this is really cool, and extremely powerful, but how and when to use which service becomes the issue.  When should I use Groups vs Teams?  Use OneDrive or SharePoint?  Use Outlook Tasks or Planner?  Very confusing!

Put Office 365 into the context of how your employees work

​Why not put all of these great services into the structure of how they work? You can! 

When your employees start their day provide them a home page that will allow them access to the services that they use everyday.  We provide a structured homepage that is the center of the operations that they use most daily.

The solution is to give them an Intranet homepage that is part of an Operational Portal Structure.

Employees start their work day at the Home page and traverse into the portal structure to their department or group portal.  They access the Office 365 services that make sense, the documents they need, and services that are relevant. This intuitive flow immediately increases productivity and limits confusion.

This is Office 365 at its peak: placing it into the context of how people do their work through an Intranet structure.

If you stick with the old model, we have found that employees resist migration to Online Services.  But with an operational portal structure, your team’s effectiveness increases with easy access to services and documents that previously looked like chaos to them.

We say it to our clients often: “It is time to take a different approach. Don’t throw everything at your team from a tools perspective!  Bring them Office 365’s tools inside the context of the organization using an operational portal structure anchored by an intranet.”

Adoption issues will diminish and soon the whole company will be smiling in the Cloud.

See how easy it is to deploy an out of the box Intranet structure to drive Office 365 adoption at  http://www.spmarketplace.com/sp-intranet-portal.html

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