Maximizing the Microsoft
Cloud with SharePoint

January 21st, 2019

CIS helps clients maximize their investment in Office 365 Solutions by leveraging deployments of components of Microsoft SharePoint. CIS has developed customized approaches to making a SharePoint initiative efficient and cost-effective, allowing clients to quickly gain positive ROI on a project through significant gains in collaboration and productivity.

Office 365 is a core solution recommended by CIS’ Subject Matter Experts. The benefits of migrating an on-premises purchased Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange solution to the Office 365 (and Azure, if necessary) Cloud are quite clear. From flexibility, to economics, to security, to staying up to date with new releases without making new purchases, Office 365 provides incredible benefits to the small and medium-sized business. The CIS team has migrated over half-a-million client users to the Microsoft Cloud, providing the necessary expertise, and ensuring projects and user adoption are a success.

Data Migration / Governance / Planning

Simply migrating email platforms and Office utilities to Office365 is a great first step, but many clients leave this effort incomplete. Quite often, users are accessing content and files from on-premises network shares and servers, or other drives and systems that are not properly leveraging the cloud. For small amounts of data these migrations are simple, but as organizations grow in complexity, as well as security and regulatory requirements, they quickly become quite complex.

CIS’ team of Subject Matter Experts and Solution Architects work with clients to review the organizational data hierarchy through several prisms. CIS’ team includes experts in both security and regulatory compliance, and Data planning efforts pay this area specific attention. Additional areas of focus for the Data Migration team include:

• Data organization

• Security

• Auditing

• Search

• Volume and capacity planning

• Data retention policies

• Ongoing management and oversight

Collaboration

Following a migration of email and Microsoft Office utilities to the cloud, CIS helps clients build upon the foundation provided by the Microsoft suite. CIS leverages the client’s entitlement to SharePoint 365 to create customized environments for employee collaboration, both intra-office and with remote employees. These solutions dramatically improve employee productivity, providing the ability for multiple people to edit and review a document simultaneously, make notes to one another, control versions, and access everything, from anywhere, 24x7x365 via cloud shared drives.

Over thousands of successful deployments, the CIS team has learned that no two clients do things in the same way. CIS’ solution architects and client engagement experts work with both the IT staff and various line-of-business owners to define areas in which building SharePoint solutions will have the most value to the company. Significant attention is paid to end-user adoption and education, CIS believes that no project is a success if end-users are unable to work with the solution at 8am on the first day of live deployment.

Customization

In addition to the product’s significant out-of-the-box capabilities, SharePoint and O365 are designed as platforms on which to build custom business solutions. From simple in-house request pages for resources or vacation time, to a full-fledged business application that stores data in a SQL database while integrating with SharePoint and Office 365 so users can make data relevant to their success.

CIS’ SharePoint experts work with clients to review business processes and workflows, to determine where additional custom development can provide efficiencies and productivity gains, or which systems can be leveraged in new ways via unique connections. Specific technologies in this area include:

• PowerBI

• Microsoft Flow

• Microsoft Graph Services

• OneDrive services

• SharePoint integration

• Azure integration

• Integration with on-premise data sources

Next Step

Through working in hundreds of client environments every year, the CIS team has found that SharePoint is quite possibly the most under-utilized business utility that most Small and Medium-sized Businesses have at their disposal. Many clients have either not set up even the most basic functionality of SharePoint or have done so but then provided no guidance to end-users on how to utilize the solution. Many other clients have a limited deployment of SharePoint in the IT department that is functional for IT specific tasks but have not taken the necessary steps to further leverage the solution across other company business units. This is typically not due to a lack of desire or talent on the internal team, but a lack of project time to properly develop the preliminary business requirements needed to make a project a success.

CIS provides clients with the security of knowing their project is in the hands of one of the most experienced teams in the industry. From conceptual discussions to design and planning to deployment and training to after-care support, the CIS team ensures that clients not only make a successful migration to the Microsoft Cloud, but that every migrated client maximizes their investment in the solution.

Office 365 is a core solution recommended by CIS’ Subject Matter Experts. The benefits of migrating an on-premises purchased Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange solution to the Office 365 (and Azure, if necessary) Cloud are quite clear. From flexibility, to economics, to security, to staying up to date with new releases without making new purchases, Office 365 provides incredible benefits to the small and medium-sized business. The CIS team has migrated over half-a-million client users to the Microsoft Cloud, providing the necessary expertise, and ensuring projects and user adoption are a success.