Microsoft 365 adoption: Early adopters as a key to success

Remote and hybrid work is permanently changing the workplace. In order to compete, businesses have to adapt. The good news is that those who keep up can reap the benefits. One of the essential tools for keeping up with remote work is Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 cloud-based productivity apps will help prepare your business for the future.

Having an all-inclusive suite of tools can be much more cost-effective than buying and maintaining multiple solutions with separate licenses. Since it’s a subscription-based service, it allows a company to pay a fee and access the services they need.

If you stay with existing software or older versions of Office 365, you will always face the dilemma of having to buy hundreds or thousands of new licenses every time a new version is released. This dilemma means you have to decide whether to keep using outdated software or pay the premium price of new licenses for everyone. Being an early adopter of Microsoft 365 is a good solution for this problem.

Benefits of Microsoft 365 adoption

Increased productivity and collaboration

Compared to traditional on-premises office software, cloud-based Microsoft 365 can make your employees more productive. It helps remote employees to collaborate more efficiently. One of the primary tools for collaboration is Microsoft Teams. It brings meetings, calls, chat, file sharing, and other apps together using one simplified interface.

Leverage the cloud

Remote and hybrid work is here to stay. The companies that leverage the cloud will reap more of the benefits. Financial leaders seem to agree, with 75% of finance leaders in a PwC survey saying they are budgeting for a more agile business environment. Cloud-based solutions are agile enough to allow the level of productivity and collaboration needed to give organizations a competitive advantage. Cloud-based Microsoft 365 will become an essential part of this new cloud era.

To leverage the cloud and stay competitive, you want to be an early adopter of the cloud. Microsoft 365 offers you an easy way to do that.

What are the pros of early adopters?

Why would any organization want to be an early adopter for Microsoft 365? There are several reasons:

• Having a smaller group of early adoption users means finding potential issues and fixing them before releasing the software to the entire organization. This solution means there will be fewer problems when you roll it out to everyone.
• It allows you to create a group of people to champion Microsoft 365 for the entire organization. These early adopters can tell everyone how much more productive they will be and offer them tips to be more effective after adoption. You can publish successes and share them with your entire organization. These stories will help convince everyone that Microsoft 365 will make them more productive and collaborative.
• Early adoption offers you a level of certainty within your organization. This certainty can help give your adoption the momentum to go company-wide.

Benefits of early adoption

Here are some of the benefits of early adoption:

Improved data protection

83% of IT decision-makers surveyed believe that having more remote workers will increase security risks. You can keep your data more secure with Microsoft 365. Since it comes with built-in security, it can help prevent data leakage. This leakage is of particular concern as more employees work remotely. The built-in security allows them to work remotely without hindering their productivity.

Microsoft 365 enhances your security with:

• Multi-factor authentication to help mitigate security risks
• Integrated Microsoft Defender to help protect against phishing attacks
• Cloud-based email filtering to reduce the risk of phishing and malware attacks

When you’re an early adopter of Microsoft 365, you can automatically keep your organization up-to-date with the latest security precautions.

Connected apps enhance collaboration

Microsoft 365 services are cloud-based and streamlined to enhance collaboration from anywhere in the world. These apps allow employees to collaborate seamlessly, improve productivity and efficiency. It will help you achieve your business goals faster.

Save money

By right-sizing your storage, early adopters can start allocating storage based on the initial group of users. You can track your number of active licenses and only pay for what you need. You can also track your storage usage and only pay for the capacity you need.

Save time

Traditional Office requires upgrades and patches. The process of manually deploying patches every month can take a lot of time and is made more difficult by people working remotely. With cloud-based Microsoft 365, companies no longer have to apply updates allowing them to reduce upkeep and save time.

Ongoing subscription fees

You will have an ongoing subscription fee that you probably didn’t have with traditional software. However, tracking and managing it can save money by having a smaller operation expense rather than a huge capital expense.

Now that you know the benefits of early adoption and may be considering implementing it in your organization, you will want to find suitable candidates for the adoption.

How to find suitable candidates for early adoption

By now, you may be wondering how you can find the ideal candidates for early adoption. You will need to find employees who:

• Are willing to take on the extra responsibility
• Want to find more efficient ways to work
• Are driven to help you create new processes and best practices
• Are good at communicating these changes and best practices to the rest of the organization
• Support other employees in your organization
• Are considerate of other people’s needs
• Are willing to accept change
• Will see the benefits of adoption
• Are likely to lead the way and help others see the benefits

In return for being in your early adoption group, you should offer them additional training to help them quickly build their Microsoft 365 proficiency. You should also be there to support them as they create new policies and best practices.

Tracking a successful Microsoft 365 adoption

As you train these early adopters of Microsoft 365, you must monitor your Microsoft 365 adoption rate to see how they are progressing. You will need to understand their Microsoft 365 content usage and see how they react to content through time.

By using the prolonged data retention in Syskit Point, you can:

• Monitor active and inactive users within Teams
• See which Teams channels are popular
• Find out if people use Teams meetings and chats for collaboration and productivity
• See which sites, pages, and documents are popular for users
• See which users are the most active and how they are accessing the information
• See which content is not accessed and possibly no longer needed
• Control the clutter to help everything stay clean before you roll it out to the remainder of your organization

Point can also improve secure collaboration across your tenant:

• Find out who has access to what in seconds
• Control external file sharing
• Find and manage guest users in Microsoft 365
• List externally shared content (including files and private channels in Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and group sites)
• See which files are shared externally so you can better judge if those files are appropriate for sharing

Syskit Point will help you see which applications are used within your early adoption group. It will help you identify if additional training is needed for specific Microsoft 365 applications or users. It will allow you to find out if your users are making the most of Teams and understand what you can do to help drive the adoption of this powerful collaboration tool.

If you want to get a comprehensive guide on how to implement adoption KPIs, encourage adoption champions, and measure adoption success, download your Office 365 adoption eBook now or start your free trial of Syskit Point to see how it can help your early adoption today.