SMB’s: 10 Steps for Creating a Unified Foundation in Office 365

Everybody knows that good foundations are important for houses, but did you know they are also critical in Office 365?  Without a unifying architecture, the best you can achieve in O365 is a collection of point solutions.   Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest part of building that foundation has nothing to do with technology.

As you probably know, the biggest factor in using technology in business is not the technology itself. It’s people!   And the same is true of the level of success you can achieve with Office 365.  For example, you can’t have a unified approach to using Office 365 if you don’t have a unified vision in fixed in the minds of your people.

There not only has to be a shared vision of what you need and want to accomplish, you also need enthusiastic participation from top management, and your people need to be committed to achieving the vision.  Naturally, creating that shared vision doesn’t happen by itself.

So how do you start? 

Since every business is unique, here are 10 things that we do to standardize and streamline the process when implementing a new, or restructure an existing, Office 365 environment (some of it’s a little bit techy, but mostly not):

1. Get your team together.   It doesn’t have to be a perfect vision, just shared.  Get your management team in a room (separately or together, virtual or otherwise).  Find out their pain points with your current business technology. Be direct. What works well today, and what doesn’t.  What’s missing.  Keep it short and keep it moving, very broad strokes, and look for recurring themes.  Just do it.  You may surprised at the interesting and important stuff people will have to say.
   • Action Item:  Align the technical architecture of SharePoint and Office 365 with what you’ve heard re: stated business goals and challenges. Identify how your management team measures success. What are the key metrics? Create a clear roadmap for your use of Office 365 and then implement the roadmap in phases.
2. Identify the main groups of people who you need to include in your Office 365 environment.  This can include both internal staff as well as external people such as clients and partners.  Even if you start internally but think you might want to share info externally later, get it out on the table. It can inform some of the short term choices you need to make.
   • Action Item: Structure your SharePoint and Office 365 environment with discrete areas for different groups of people. In general, assign permissions to specific areas by group membership and not assigning individual permissions.
3. Create a conceptual framework for your environment so you can start with your biggest pain points and then incrementally add new functionality in a controlled manner in later phases.  Decide how you will structure your intranet/extranet, and any project-specific workspaces so that they integrate well together yet are secure and separate from each other.
   • Action Item:  Define an overall site hierarchy for your Office 365 SharePoint environment. Include areas for individual groups of people (specific departments, clients) as well as for specific types of processes (e.g. projects and proposals).
4. Identify the major interdepartmental collaborative processes such as proposal generation, project collaboration, budgeting, etc.  If you’re using other applications for parts of the process, which ones?
   • Action Item: Define the structured info (lists and databases) and unstructured info (mostly documents) that people need while they are working together on these different types of interdepartmental projects.
5. Identify major business information flows in the company.  Again, high level, but look for how the information in these key processes moves both within and between departments.  Sketch it out.  Look for redundancies and where the same information lives in different data stores.
   • Action Item: Define the system of record for key information. Define sources and uses of each major type. Define ownership and responsibility for data quality at different points in the overall process.
6. Create custom site templates to support the above key processes, for example a collaborative project or proposal site template, so that people can see all relevant project artifacts in context with all other project info.
   • Action Item:  Structure your content types so that so you can easily roll up tasks from multiple projects.  Consider impact of managed metadata and search in your design.
7. Identify key document types that you must manage, e.g. contracts, proposals, product specs, budgets, etc.  Also define what metadata to keep for each one.  This will greatly improve their “find-ability” and can also be used in automating workflows.  Identify the producers and consumers of each document type.
   • Action Item: Look for common metadata among the various document types. Consider using managed metadata or master lookup lists to keep data standard across the company.
8. Define how security should work for different parts of your SharePoint environment.  Who can do what and where? Will you allow managers or their delegates to control the content in their part of the intranet?  To what extent?
   • Action Item: Define security according to the groups that people belong to and the roles that these groups play in different parts of your environment, e.g. sometimes data creator other times consumer only.
9. Define a corporate wide taxonomy for key business terms and owners for each major part of the overall corporate term hierarchy.  Among other benefits, having consistent key terms that can be used across your entire organization will enable people to search and roll up information from anywhere in SharePoint and get consistent and complete results.
   • Action Item: Do this as early as possible so as to minimize the amount of retroactive tagging that you need to do. Use the managed metadata service and consider purchasing a pre-defined taxonomy to jump start your efforts.
10. And finally … don’t go it alone.  It takes a while to get a “feel” for the SharePoint platform, e.g. what’s easy and what’s hard and where the tradeoffs are.  Engage a Microsoft Partner who specializes in SharePoint and who can speak equally well with both business and IT people.
    • Action Item: Check out Microsoft’s “delegated admin” in Office 365. This feature enables you to engage a partner for a particular area of Office 365, e.g. SharePoint, while keeping your current partner(s) for their specific areas of expertise, e.g. Exchange or Lync.  

If you feel like your use of Office 365 could be a little less chaotic, I hope that these tips will help you get your team on the same page and provide you with a second chance to get your environment organized so you can get more strategic value and better results from your Office 365 investment.   But the important thing is to get started.  You’ll be glad you did!

Best regards,

David Remillard
FTG President / SharePoint Consultant
http://www.futuretechnologygroup.com

has a fixed-price service for structuring Office 365 environments for SMB’s (with generally < 300 employees).   It encapsulates many of the above methods and is technically based on our SmartPortal Architecture™ (a flexible framework we developed to provide a manageable context for team collaboration and business process improvement).  We packaged this service as a fixed-price consulting engagement that we call a SharePoint Mulligan™.    If you’d like help building your Office 365 foundation, please check it out!