How to start with O365 or SPO?

Posted on by petercattersel

We provide senior business and ICT consulting for Microsoft Office 365 (O365) and SharePoint (SPO is SharePoint Online). Achieving benefits using these platforms requires a vision, a sound project approach & plan, a sustained supporting organization and be ready to continuously evolve.

The key factor in getting a successful O365 or SharePoint implementation is “User Adoption and Engagement“, getting your employees or external visitors actually use O365/SharePoint in their daily work. This only results in more productivity, more quality or better retention… ​We help you to implement O365/SharePoint successfully.  Read our About page for an overview of our services.

To get you started, here are some first tips:

  1. O365 and SharePoint should support your company strategic objectives. So first start with what are the O365/SharePoint business objectives. Is it: More productivity; Support remote or home work; Enable a cultural change towards the new way of working together (NWOW); Or other goals that are crucial in your organisation.
  2. At the same time, you should also have clear ICT objectives. For the cloud, O365, you should achieve a significant benefit in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the related ICT applications.  And, O365 or SharePoint need to be “positioned” within your ICT landscape. The future users should have a clear understanding when to use these tools and when not.
  3. Next, you start to analyse the business requirements and key success factors for the implementation, this together with all actors involved. Typically this study includes workshops, analysis and preferably a prototype of some key requirements to show how it could work.
  4. From an IT point of view, the logical application/solution architecture as well as the required infrastructure and integration must be defined.
  5. And, experience has shown, don’t continue if you don’t want to discuss and implement a minimal level of governance. I know, not easy, nobody wants to do it, but SharePoint now exists for over 10 years, and one of the major lessons learned is that it will not work without a proper governance plan.
  6. OK, we conclude for now… the last step is to define your way forward, you project approach and plan. Based on the information assembled in the steps before, add some change management investigation, and you can start drawing your implementation plan!

Success! And have fun with O365 or SharePoint. These are great tools, many users will love them, so why wait… start today.