Caution, there will be typos. The information on this post is an AI generated transcript taken from Episode 10 of the Level Up M365 Podcast link here – https://levelupm365.com/2024/11/01/podcast-10-increase-roi-on-m365-and-also-reduce-liability-of-data-leakage/
Transcript
Increasing ROI on Microsoft 365. Hey guys. Welcome to another fireside chat here. This is, you know, kind of a thought experiment, this these fireside chats are not meant to be in the weeds. Excuse me, I’m a little winded. This got done a little workout, but the purpose of this meeting of this fireside chat is to kind of, you know, get you thinking about how how can I increase. The ROI reduce the total cost of ownership, TCO or Microsoft 365. Now the shortened version of this entire rant. Is. Adoption, I mean that’s in a nutshell, adoption, the more you use the platform, the less you’re dependent on other things. And depending on the nature of your data. Yeah. The nature of your content like you know is it is. It is. It are you. Are are you housing private data? Well, adoption also complements data governance because the more you adopt the system and the more you you. Apply those compliance restrictions data governance restrictions that are part of your standard E5 license, for example. The more value you’re getting out of that investment of your E5 license, your Microsoft 365 E 5 license and another thing you it’s hard to calculate, but you’re mitigating risk. An example. This is mentioned in one of my last fireside chats. If you use something like SurveyMonkey, which I love SurveyMonkey, but if you use it like SurveyMonkey to take you know to do polling or to I don’t know having it as an input form let’s say let’s say you you know work at a law firm and you have a SurveyMonkey form as your input form. Now confidential data from your client resides on SURVEYMONKEY’S database. And sure you can pull that into your environment your 365 environment, but you’re only as strong as your weakest link. So if you have the opportunity to do that in a in a Microsoft 365 form. Which that term isn’t that specific product. Microsoft has a lot of products for forms. But just to say you were to create a form on Microsoft 365 and as your input form for your your your clients, the data is secured at that point from. From the point of entry it’s it doesn’t have to go through any third party services that you don’t govern so. In nutshell, those those are some, you know, high level elevator pitch ways of increasing your value, you know reducing your or increasing your ROI, decreasing your TCO’s on in 365 but there’s so much more and one of the things. That I kind of wanted to take this time to talk about is recycling solutions. So for example you can build pseudo code or low code solutions on Microsoft Microsoft 365. I I talked about this concept of a Union expression which is a deduping mechanism. I came from an SAP world where creating deduping mechanisms cost thousands of dollars well. I can teach any average Joe a line of code in the power platform to and to dedupe a mailing list. Well, that function is agnostic to a mailing list, right? That deduping logic can be applied anywhere you have Excel spreadsheets, it can be applied anywhere you have emails anywhere you have word documents with customers or customer numbers. So finding a way to advertise. Is. Hey, you know what? We have this deduping functionality or we have this low code Center of Excellence and one of the offerings from this center of excellence is this ability to dedupe your code. That is something you can recycle around your department. Likewise, I have a I have taken a I have a desk reservation app that I built and it’s built on the power platform. SharePoint is the back back end and what it does is some basic math to where if you want to reserve a desk from a, you know hybrid work environment. You can go in there and you can reserve a desk and it integrates with your outlook calendar, but it also removes that. It also removes that desk from the view for the time that you’re there for the duration that you’ve reserved the desk. It’s removed, the asset is removed from everyone else looking to reserve that desk, so it’s it’s removed from their available the inventory. Well that as you know as as as the the terminology I’m speaking that is an app that is booking desks. But if you had to do a rental car fleet, if you had to do. A. I don’t know laptop asset management, any type of asset management. That logic is the same. It’s something that’s added removed from your inventory. So again. Recycling and repackaging that app, the more you can do that, the higher your investment in this platform is. Now, you may say, say to me, OK, Joe, that’s very technical. You have, you have this great ability to write code and make apps, but that’s not where we are. In our environment, So what you’re saying is not. That’s true. First, my challenge is to get there, not to necessarily be an in-house software development company, but to learn about the low code power platform that you’re paying for. That’s my first challenge. Second challenge is. Look at this. Stuff you’re configuring, so I’m going to use Microsoft bookings as an example. Microsoft bookings is an external public calendar. That your company can throw out there and one client of mine has car seat safety training and they were paying thousands of dollars a month in doing all these manual tasks for, you know, their staff availability. So they could provide. A car seat safety training they it’s a service that they do for free where you can enlist and they train you how to safely install a car seat. So you know, buying the domain then taking in the data, connecting to a database using Excel or some manual spreadsheet for managing schedules, that is all super, super hard to do. Whereas Microsoft bookings, which is part of your E5 license does all. That for. You and. Like I said, think about that use case. That is a public facing calendar for people to reserve appointments. That application can be used internally or externally in different use cases. You can apply it to many different use cases. So I mean you can even pair it with the app I just mentioned. And use that as a way to reserve an asset and before you come in to pick up your asset, you schedule a booking. So you know someone’s there for you to to hand it off to you. So these are things SharePoint is a good example to people build lots of stuff on SharePoint. My challenge is not to stay focused on the. The the apps that I listed here but to think holistically from the top down don’t build these one off solution. Things it’s OK to learn and build one of our solutions, but don’t invest the bulk majority of your time in these one solutions. Think about how what you’re building can be modular, modular and can be repackaged for other use cases. And I gave 2 examples in this fireside chat. One was a you know kind of an app development perspective, but the other is a configuration. The bookings app is a configuration a SharePoint site is a configuration, so any basic technical analyst, maybe even business analyst, has the aptitude to build these things. Any college student can build these things that I’ve. So. That is my challenge. That is my thought of the day. Of course, these are fireside chats are not meant to be comprehensive, just kind of me going off on a rant and seeing where that takes me. And then I also like to use my blog post to go into more specifics, so be sure to go to my site, check out the blog post, subscribe to all the podcast. Watchers so you don’t miss these updates. Talk to you later.
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