What our customers say about us

I’ve just returned from a week visiting Syskit customers, and as always with these visits, I find out a lot of things that I either didn’t know or certainly didn’t expect to hear.

Visiting customers is my favourite part of the job. Until you are sat in front of a customer, listening to them telling you about what they think of the product and why they use it, it’s hard to really know why they ended up buying a license. There’s a lot of detail I’m missing out here, but below is a summary of the things I heard about Syskit and its products. 

Visibility, Governance, and Security aren’t just words for a headline – these are significant problems that customers have to deal with.

From small customers to large, these three words came up time and time again in various combinations. And when we start talking about “What keeps you awake at night?“, this is what we hear over and over. I was particularly taken aback by the importance of visibility when working with Microsoft 365 and/or SharePoint.

Without proper monitoring tools, how can they possibly know that somebody has just accessed a file they shouldn’t see? Or that there are no permissions at all on certain folders? This problem is particularly acute if there is a lot of staff turnover. Proper handovers are rare. When leaving a job, do people ever take the time to make sure all of the folder and document access is cleaned up? Rarely.

The head of IT never has enough time

I doubt this is news to anyone. But the buildup of “vital“ tasks is relentless and only increasing. These people often work in very small teams (if not alone) and are doing absolutely crucial jobs.

Whether it’s legislation, internal processes, increasing security needs, or a number of other issues, there now has to be automation of governance tasks. Maybe it was possible years ago to do this by hand, but not anymore. This is particularly acute as the number of employees with advanced security and compliance experience is, at best, stable and, at worst, in decline. This is one of the most sought-after skills in the industry, and companies are struggling to recruit.

Marketing departments are the worst culprits

I work in marketing, so this was a little embarrassing. But which department is it that is generating new images and video files on a weekly basis? And there is an additional problem that these files can’t generally be diffed. So, the backend systems store enormous amounts of old files, most of which are needed, many of which are huge. And the real problem? Who knows what should be saved and what can be deleted. Is a file left for six months “old“? Two years? Does it depend on who wrote the content or what folder it is in?

This issue came up time and time again, and thankfully, it’s something that we tackle at Syskit.

There is confusion over the naming of Microsoft’s products in this space

SharePoint, Microsoft 365, M365, Microsoft Office, Copilot, Teams, Premium vs Standard. Users are struggling…

User experience matters

We’ve recently done a significant redesign of our product, Syskit Point. I incorrectly assumed that system administrators wouldn’t really care about this. I was wrong. In fact, almost all of the customers mentioned out of the blue that our recent UI redesign had made their lives considerably easier. It’s no longer acceptable to leave admin people with an unusable product, just because they work on the backend. They have the same expectations of an administrative tool for Microsoft 365 as they do for any modern piece of software. We are proud of our UI at Syskit, but it’s also great to hear that from customers.

Oh, and it had better be a browser-based SaaS tool! Customers use these tools daily and don’t want to waste any of their very limited time struggling with something that is hard to use.

Thank you again to all of our customers who have helped make Syskit create great products. For more information about Syskit Point, take a look at the Syskit Point page.