Microsoft 365 security

Stories from the sales trenches: How Syskit Point helped enhance Office 365 governance

In this blog post, we will focus on a customer from a not-for-profit industry working on humanitarian crises for over four decades.

With a dedicated IT Team that takes care of their Office 365 environment, this worldwide organization wanted something to ease their workload and make the management of Office 365 simple.

The challenges

Our customer’s biggest issue was the amount of content that users were creating. Not having any solution in place only made things more complicated.

Ivan Mamic Sales Syskit

One of the obstacles the customer wanted to overcome was a simple permission game by checking who has access to which files, folders, and sites. PowerShell scripts can be very cumbersome to write and take a long time, so they preferred a simple and easy-to-read report.

Ivan Mamic
Sales Manager, Syskit

As the number of Microsoft Teams grew, the customer wanted to automate tracking of all those Teams. Implementing clear governance policies would make the company’s flow easier. They wanted the possibility for site owners and admins to archive or even delete a site or a team that is no longer active. Once we tracked down all the challenges the customer faced, the next step was a demo and presentation of the potential solution.

During the demo, with multiple parties from their end, it was hard to gather everyone’s feedback at once. In the end, we managed to put the actual challenges into the spotlight and meet everyone’s expectations. The next big thing we turned toward to was the proper evaluation of Syskit Point and meeting the success criteria as defined before setting up the proof of concept. Then, the real challenge kicked in.

The first deployment was in August, a holiday season for everyone, and it was hard to get all those included on a call. After we overcame the logistic challenge, some technical problems occurred, and our team gladly helped resolve them. Needless to say that overcoming those hurdles resulted in a prolonged trial period that took more than two months, but in the end, both the customer and we came out as the victors.

The solution

To quantify the success of the trial period, we had to meet the customer’s requirements. Success criteria included:

  • The proper use of Office 365 Audit log capabilities of Syskit Point
    • Does it report on every site collection?
    • Does it report on every activity done within Syskit Point?
    • Can we export the report in a proper format?
  • Permissions reporting on access levels within every folder and the ability to pull those reports up quickly.
  • Governance capabilities of Syskit Point

In terms of lifecycle management, the customer wanted to confirm that Syskit Point can report on inactive sites and that those sites can be archived and deletedPermissions review was also a part of these initial requirements, including testing of automatic e-mails sent by Syskit Point. They wanted to see how successfully their owners would perform those actions.

The customer liked the ability to have everything in one place, granular reporting, automation of tasks, and having a good Office 365 governance process that will take care of their environment. Although the testing tool took longer than expected, the customer had a dedicated testing team, and Syskit Point earned a high grade in meeting the previously mentioned requirements. After the evaluation was completed, it was time for the results to be presented internally to the decision-makers. The high grade played a crucial part as the key stakeholders recognized the value in Syskit Point.

The results

When the testing is done, there comes every salesman’s favorite part, which is the commercial discussion with the customer. The customer knew about the pricing before the testing began, but we needed to reaffirm it and the testing value. Since they are dedicated to helping others in need, we gladly met them halfway by extending a discount, showing support to not-for-profit institutions.

To finalize the deal, we still needed to clear some roadblocks. The first one came in the way of a global pandemic that caused some budget constraints. With slowed down donations, they were extra careful with their spending. The customer wanted Syskit Point for multiple years as they saw the high value in our solution but, due to budget constraints, we agreed that the initial purchase would be for a one-year subscription. After, they will commit to a two-year subscription. After a few months of testing and overcoming all the challenges with the team, we managed efforts from both sides and onboarded our customer to Syskit.

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