The Art of Office 365 and OneDrive for Business User Management 1
Table of contents Blurring the lines the increasing synthesis of IT and business processes...3 Your business s most important resource...4 Quick View: Office 365 and licenses...5 Why IT teams struggle with the onboarding/sun-setting conundrum...6 Streamline your processes to gain major benefits...7 Ensure licenses are used efficiently...8 Tracking adoption and usage...9 Good governance is essential...11 The misconceptions of OneDrive for Business...12 Essentials for user management best practice...13 About Metalogix...14 2
Blurring the lines the increasing synthesis of IT and business processes Traditional business processes and IT are now so intertwined that the role of the IT administrator has evolved beyond the simple maintenance of servers and networks. Take the process of onboarding and sun-setting of employees. It now relies on technology to such a degree that your IT department has almost as big a role to play in how a new recruit settles into a job as the HR team. While HR will get the employee onto payroll and introduce the individual into the company s culture, it is the work of the IT department to get new users up to optimal productivity as quickly as possible. IT provides them with the accounts they need to get their work done, the right storage quotas, provisions to content and sites, email setup, access to Skype for Business and more. This ebook will focus on best practices for Office 365 and OneDrive for Business when it comes to managing a company s users and IT resources, highlighting business issues related to poor management and provide best practice solutions. Along with best practice for IT setup, IT admins need to regularly monitor who across the business is using licenses and who isn t. Rogue licenses (purchased but not being used by anyone) need to be found and redistributed or cancelled if no one is using them. 3
Your business s most important resource According to a study from Bersin by Deloitte 1, the processes of engaging new hires with the particulars of their roles and familiarizing them with company culture is essential to retaining them over the long term, as well as helping them succeed in their positions at an organization. The business benefits of a new employee hitting the ground running are clear: a rapid settling in period will ensure a quicker path to full productivity. A poor onboarding experience, by contrast, can result in up to four percent of new employees leaving their new job on the first day as they may face productivity barriers right from the beginning. As much as 20 percent of staff turnovers occurs in the first 45 days of employment 2 ; and the cost of replacing an average employee is estimated to be between US$3,000 and $18,000 (and even more in higher positions). Clearly, the right process needs to be put in place so every new hire can be given the time and focus they need to become fully productive. Similarly, when employees leave the company (sun-setting), the HR and IT teams need to collaborate to ensure that the individual completes the right exit interviews, and their access to company IT is revoked. The IT department s approach to user empowerment and management will play an essential role throughout their employment. 1 PR Newswire. Strategic Onboarding can help new hires. 2014. Available online: http://goo.gl/hpx2yg 2 Urbanbound. 2015. The Onboarding Statistics You Need to Know. Available here: http://www.urbanbound.com/blog/onboarding-infographic-statistics 4
Quick view: Office 365 and licenses Office 365 (and OneDrive for Business) is a subscription plan that includes the most recent version of Microsoft Office and is bought on a monthly basis per user the published prices range from US$5.00 to $35.00 per user, per month. The great thing about using Office 365 for your business is you only need to pay for what you use that means if you have a 100 users, you only need to pay for 100 licenses per month. However, departing employees leave a spare license that you will continue to pay for every month. Do you hire someone to replace the outgoing employee? Do you cancel the license? If you have ten times the employee pool, then these questions become a little more urgent, and it will be a little trickier to keep account of active and rogue licenses. That s where the importance of a quality user management process comes in. 5
Why IT teams struggle with the onboarding/sun-setting conundrum Office 365 is the world s leading cloudbased enterprise productivity environment and can provide tools which support and facilitate many of your key business processes that allow your users to achieve their potential. Nevertheless, while Office 365 promises great security, productivity enhancement and anytime access, it can cause issues for administrators as they: Account provisioning is one area that can cause real problems if not dealt with properly. Without a plan, your IT team can be overwhelmed with the amount of users, the amount of data or speed of change. When it comes to account provisioning, having a robust, repeatable and consistent process for creating accounts, adding data authorization and other access for users is the best way forward but can be easily omitted by busy IT departments. Need to learn disparate processes to manage users Risk being bogged down with PowerShell commands, and Excel lists, rather than focusing on good governance Try to make the best use of the licenses and tools available for users Attempt to monitor user adoption Work to prevent security management get out of control 6
Streamline your processes to gain major benefits In this section, we outline key areas you need to improve your processes so as to boost security, employee productivity and reduce waste. A best practice onboarding/sun-setting procedure should be a priority within your IT s user management setup. There should be a specific plan in place that makes assigning Office 365 licenses, email, and other important IT identification and authorization as efficient as possible. Automation and workflows can help organize the steps involved here, and as with any admin task, monitoring the process is of great importance so that changes can be made if and when needed. For example, the first step of the onboarding process should begin well before the employee s first day. Along with the official job offer email, attach a form for IT that will collect the new hire s basic information that can be imported automatically into the company s system this will save time from the opening day processes. 7
Ensure licenses are used efficiently On the IT side, a comprehensive introduction to your IT environment is essential this is about providing access and authorization to the underlying infrastructure that enables your business to work. When it comes to Office 365 and OneDrive for Business the IT team will need to consider: Do you have the right number of licenses, of the correct type? Do you have all the correct information you need on each user? Who is providing this information, or coordinating its collection? Do you know what groups and level of access they need? What special products do they need like Yammer or Delve? What is the procedure for adding users to Active Directory? Send the right sort of Welcome email, share login credentials and password policies. What training and support mechanisms are in place to educate the user on best or business practices? What initial help does the user need? How do new users ask for help on day one? When an employee leaves, an account sun-setting process needs to be established and executed even more quickly to reassign their license, remove their IT system access and secure content and data. While doing that involves going through the above list in reverse, it can be much more complex than that, as care needs to be taken that data and access is correctly archived, reassigned or removed. How can this be overcome? Out of the box reporting in Office 365 continues to improve but the use of a third party tool to give your IT department a complete overview of your entire user database is of huge benefit when attempting to monitor existing users. Metalogix Essentials provides detailed insight into your Office 365 and OneDrive for Business users so IT teams can better manage the onboarding and sun-setting process. 8
Tracking adoption and usage Office 365 is disrupting the business landscape and every organization has to keep up or risk falling permanently behind. While scaling the number of licenses you use is greatly appealing, the IT department needs to make sure there is a system in place that allows you to see where your licenses are, how many you are using, redistribution of unused and how many you need. For IT admins it s vital to ask certain questions of their system: To answer these questions, you need to have an overview of the overall health of your IT infrastructure as well as the ability to hone in on granular details. For instance, it s important to see where your licenses are being used, but just as important is the need to know by how much: where are users most active and how does this relate to aspects of the business such as content growth? Also, being able to provide the statistics on adoption rates for IT tools and solutions will relate to overall ROI which is important as your IT looks to prove the viability of moving to the cloud. Where are users most active? Where is content growing the fastest? Are there red flags that would indicate license issues? What to do if people aren t using their licenses? What level of training is being offered to optimize licenses and productivity? How can we get better insight? Metalogix Essentials is designed to give your IT admins the ability to monitor user adoption and track content growth as well as provide in-depth analysis of shared content, so you can see what individuals and teams are working most productively together. 9
Good governance is essential A lack of a well thought out governance plan that ensures you are staying within the compliance boundaries and is important for avoiding unneeded penalties that could result in fines and bad publicity. This is another area where rogue licenses can potentially harm your business. It is possible to stay compliant in Office 365, but it requires a consistent plan. And even then, to identify security issues and prevent breaches of data there is a lot of information and Excel files to wade through. How can this be achieved? A comprehensive governance and compliance plan isn t simply essential for ensuring optimal license management and cost it benefits your organization s security posture as well. Microsoft has invested in several features in this area including rudimentary data loss prevention capabilities. Metalogix Essentials adds complimentary capabilities to Office 365 s out of the box tools. For example, it can find and notify you of security flaws that could potentially become data breaches. This includes former employees who still have access to the system. For current employees you can see and set who has access to what content, giving you better control and peace of mind. 10
The misconceptions of OneDrive for Business Billed as an integral part of Office 365, OneDrive for Business provides your employees with a secure and managed place to sync, share and store their work files in the cloud, allowing them to access them on any device. A formidable collaboration platform, in theory, OneDrive for Business has become a jumble in the different ways people use the platform personal use, some work projects, personal versions of work projects, externally shared content, etc. The challenge and the opportunity faced by businesses is trying to figure out how OneDrive for Business is used in their organization, if it s going against their ideals or putting them into security or compliance difficulties. How can this be solved? Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 or Essentials for Drives solve OneDrive for Business s administration difficulties, by providing the needed structure and function when it comes to onboarding onto the platform and cultivating a more secure cloud collaboration system. Essentials for Drives gives you the ability to know what content is in your OneDrive environment, how it s being used and shared and to ensure content security and relevancy. Perform powerful analysis on your OneDrive environment Report trends in site and user activity, data growth, usage and permissions and sharing settings Take advantage of an interactive dashboard with detailed, actionable reports 11
Essentials for user management best practice Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 is a powerful solution that will give you detailed overview and control of your Office 365 environment. With Essentials, organizations can gain important insight on their user engagement data, onboarding and sun-setting stats, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and other Office 365 workload usage (including Skype for Business) and complete control of Office 365 licensing to enable the highest possible ROI from your subscription. Microsoft has made several recent improvements to both Office 365 and OneDrive for Business, particularly for end users. However, progress gaps still remain for meeting all of the needs for IT Pros. Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 provides complimentary capabilities to the out of the box tools and bridges the functionality gaps experienced by IT Pros. Metalogix Essentials for Office 365 also features: Office 365 Backup backup and restore content from Exchange Online Mailboxes, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Bulk editing of content attributes users can maintain control of their own content through the use of a centrally-deployed app directly in their SharePoint interface Security and Permissions Management Admins can discover, analyze and manage users and permission across multiple site collections and farms (including license, permissions and content) Plus, many more capabilities to simplify managing user access, monitor adoption of both Office 365 and OneDrive, track the growth of content and analyze and control external sharing and other security parameters. See how Metalogix Essentials can help you perfect the art of Office 365 and OneDrive for Business user management, download a free trial today. Download Trial 12
About Metalogix Metalogix the market-leading provider of solutions to move, manage and protect content within enterprise collaboration platforms. Over 20,000 clients trust Metalogix to optimize the availability, performance, and security of their content across the collaboration lifecycle. US. +1 202.609.9100 www.metalogix.com Copyright 2016 Metalogix International GmbH. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. 13