Assessing The Usage of Microsoft SharePoint Through Structured Workshops

One of the most important decisions an organization can make is their choice of content management software. With more and more business operations happening digitally, how you store, catalog, and collaborate with your information matters more than ever.

It’s no wonder that many organizations rely on Microsoft programs to handle their business. Microsoft 365 (M365) takes the old Microsoft Office suite of applications to the next level by incorporating classics like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel alongside newer necessities like Teams, SharePoint and Power Apps.

TEAM IM’s M365 managed services ensure that you get the most out of your software usage. TEAM IM is proud to be a Microsoft Gold Partner— meaning our team of experts possesses a deep knowledge of all aspects of your M365 software.

Through an in-depth M365 assessment, we can identify how you’re currently using your software, your goals for future usage, and implement a strategy to help you achieve those goals with an optimum M365 license configuration potentially saving you money on your annual subscription. 

Enter the Workshop

Because M365 touches every part of your organization, TEAM IM strives to learn everything we can about how you operate. To this end, we run a series of workshops that cover a wide range of topics.

These workshops have been designed to optimally address how you use your technology currently, as well as find the areas that can be improved. As an organization grows, bottlenecks can emerge around workflows that weren’t designed to scale upward.

Our workshops find those bottlenecks and put in place preliminary plans to address them through better integrated systems, business process automation, or new tools designed specifically for those issues.

By organizing our workshops strategically, we are able to progress through your technological needs. Each workshop has a focus that your team can prepare questions for and highlight issues that they face on a day-to-day basis. 

Workshop 1

The first part of your M365 assessment focuses on compliance. What used to be known as the M365 Compliance Center is now the Microsoft Purview Compliance Portal. As you upgrade your systems, there will be changes to how certain aspects of compliance operate.

Since compliance is always of the utmost importance, we schedule this workshop first. The idea is to educate, inform and gather feedback about your specific compliance needs and how they can be met in a TEAM IM CDX environment.

The TEAM IM CDX is a Customer Digital Experience in which the customer can see how Microsoft’s products and services can respond to their needs. TEAM IM demonstrates the efficacy of M365’s tools and applications in a digital environment to your team.

Through your team’s participation, we can learn about your current state, your specific compliance activities, and get more information about what you want from M365 expansion. Ideas and information from this session will influence your implementation strategy.

Workshop 2

The next scheduled workshop focuses on utilizing the tools found in M365 for business process automation. Specifically, SharePoint and Teams provide many opportunities for automation.

In this workshop, we will identify the types of processes that are best suited to automation and learn about your already extant automated processes. New automations will be factored into your implementation.

This workshop depends on the people with intimate knowledge of your day-to-day processes. Their knowledge will help us better identify pain points so that your M365 expansion can address pain points and make everyone’s work more efficient.

Workshop 3

At this point in your M365 assessment, the discussion of scope and purpose must be had. What are your plans for M365? How do you want to use SharePoint? We help you explore use cases derived from business requirements to find solutions for problems and plan for the future.

As part of the third workshop, take a deep dive into your current document management processes. Do you already use SharePoint? If so, what is working and what isn’t? How do you store and classify your content? 

By coming to this workshop with thoughts about scope and purpose, as well as questions about how to better utilize SharePoint, we can begin crafting solutions for the short term and for the implementation phase.

Workshop 4

This is the point where strategies and solutions begin to take shape. In this workshop, we review use cases from the previous session to identify an initial target use case. We will examine high-level requirements and document our findings.

When a target use case has been identified, we will demonstrate how SharePoint Information Architecture can be used. Education about how information is organized, created, updated, discovered, shared, and archived is a primary goal of this session.

The use cases that we target for examination and documentation should involve common processes involving documents or data collection. Use cases that include tracking via spreadsheet are also valuable to review in this workshop.

Workshop 5

Continuing from the previous session, this workshop focuses on key components such as site structure, metadata, templating requirements, and configuration settings. At its conclusion, your team will have a thorough overview of your incoming information architecture.

In this workshop, the information from the previous session on data organization and so forth will be augmented by looking at elements of sites, lists and libraries as they relate to your use cases.

Your team’s ideas and knowledge of existing processes and requirements will be invaluable. They help us gain clarity and identify strategic avenues that can be used to improve your processes and workflows.

Workshop 6

With a target use case and the information collected by TEAM IM as part of your M365 assessment, we can begin looking at access and permissions. Access control, external sharing, and security group creation all come into play in this session.

As part of your M365 managed services, cloud migration may be a path you take. Even without migration, your data will be stored in a new structure. This demands new security controls and policies.

Important questions to think about in this session revolve around your current security protocols. What security is legally required in your industry? How do you plan to work with external collaborators? 

Workshop 7

Design is important. It can make the difference between an intuitive user experience and a frustrating slog through multiple menus. And proper branding and logo distribution can help create a sense of visual unity for your internal and external collaborators.

How do you want to present your organization to your team? When they see your logo, what do you want them to think of? What input could your comms team bring to this workshop?

Workshop 8

This workshop summarizes the progress made from the previous sessions as well as information gained from an in-depth technical review. This gives a view of your current state and sets up the next steps in the future.

All the planning and documentation that has been put in place for the next phases is reviewed as plans for development and implementation are recommended. 

In many ways, this is the most exciting workshop because it is the pivot point from the present to the possible. From here, your optimization of your M365 usage truly begins.

The Advisory Advantage

A strong course of advisory consultation is the key to successfully designing a strategy to upgrade your use of technology. After all, software investment is too costly to just throw money at the newest thing without knowing how it can actually benefit you.

An M365 assessment from TEAM IM shows you where you are and creates a pathway to where you could be. After these workshops have concluded, our developers will have all the information they need to create a pilot program for you and usher you into your new era.

Microsoft 365 is an incredible suite of applications that allows for faster searches, simpler data storage, document generation, and more. It takes advantage of the cloud and leverages metadata for optimal discoverability of assets. 

Don’t just rely on out of date processes and workflows because that’s what you’ve always done. You can get so much more out of M365. Let TEAM IM, your Microsoft Gold Partner with 25+ Years of expertise, show you how.