IT services provider and CoreView partner iVision recently introduced the CoreView M365 management platform to McKenney’s, Inc., a 72-year old construction management and services firm.
McKenney’s knows how to build things right – and doesn’t waste a motion. With iVision’s help, McKenny’s constructed a new way to manage, secure, and use adoption to optimize Office 365 – and do so in mere weeks.
iVision is a product reseller, and a services organization with consulting services and a managed services practice. “We target best of breed partners to go to market with, like CoreView. Our model is to provide full-service support to our clients, meaning product resale, consulting services, and ongoing managed services support for every partner we go to market with. Our plan is to continue to ramp up consultants and engineers to be able to fully support clients with CoreView and make our GTM approach together even stronger,” said Mark Argyle, iVision director of marketing and product management.
In fact, the project brought together three Atlanta area companies – iVision and MeKenney’s are based in Atlanta proper, while CoreView is headquartered in nearby Alpharetta, GA.
McKenney’s is a technology driven company applying innovation to its construction business, and with the help of iVision, its Office 365 environment as well. “We really try to be on the cutting edge of technology,” said McKenney’s CIO Shaun M. Hunt.
At the time of this writing, McKenney’s was just two months into their CoreView journey, and the wins keep racking up.
Day One: On Day One iVision did a full tenant assessment using the CoreView Office 365 Health Check, a complete analysis with an action plan of the O365 environment. “I think it was 48 hours or 72 hours, which is very rapid. We got significant value quickly through that initial assessment,” Hunt said. “The initial assessment validated all of the things I was concerned about. I immediately said, ‘this is a product I want.’”
The O365 Health Check was a blueprint for action, outlining the issues Hunt needed to address to realize near-immediate value. “This tool is magic,” Hunt said.
The Health Check showed McKenney’s had 53 admin accounts, and not enough MFA. “It pinpointed a number of quick wins from a licensing, savings, adoption, and security improvement standpoint. It gave us a road map providing quick wins that would provide value immediately and then ultimately more over time,” Hunt said.
So Hunt bought the entire CoreView CoreSuite. “This wasn’t a play to just have our helpdesk have a nicer UI than Microsoft. It was the play to rapidly push more adoption into our organization. We just didn’t have the tools with Microsoft’s own platform to say who’s using it, and how are they using it? CoreView gave us that value,” Hunt said.
The First 24 Hours of Actual Use: The visibility offered by the Health Check was the tip of the iceberg. “On day one I got all the licensing under control. We’re on Microsoft pretty much for everything — Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, phones, OneNote — you name the product on the Office 365 suite and we are on it. We found some duplicate licenses, and removed those, and at the same time found over subscriptions. People that we gave E5s needed only E3s. People with E3s could do with E1s. We were able to get about 8% of our licenses reallocated in a more optimal way,” Hunt said. “We plugged it in, and in the first 24 hours found out duplicate licenses, over subscriptions, and a couple of process breakdowns because we have everything automated through PowerShell, UI path, and RPA. We have all these things that run in the background, and sometimes there are abbreviated terminations. We didn’t follow our own processes, and CoreView validated all of the missing gaps in our own processes.”
Week Two-Four: Much was accomplished in the second half of the first month. “We found a lot of internal setup issues from the week two to week four time period. We remedied all of those and now we’re in the phase where we’re looking at people by job title and what applications they are using so we can drive adoption. ”
“Then throughout the next two or three weeks, we identified process gaps for security. We thought we had MFA enabled on everyone, but 10-15% of the people were missing MFA. We thought we had all the configurations set correctly for passwords. Nope. We found accounts that were in the wrong Active Directory Operating Unit (OU), so they were just not syncing the way that we thought they were syncing to Office 365.”
The discovery of 54 O365 global admins was an eye opener. “The biggest thing we found is we over prescribed some of the non-global admin roles. We were giving out User Administration, and Exchange Administration pretty much like candy to every IT person there was even though their job really didn’t have a need for them to be in Exchange Admin and Office 365 Admin. Once we had this visibility, we were able to take a lot of those back and now will be delegating several of those permissions,” Hunt explained. With CoreView, admin duties can be delegated to those with lesser privileges, and virtual tenants can break up the tenant into securely isolated units.
Security visibility has been another bonus. “Just by shoring up the multi factor, we were able to unsync about 20% of the accounts that we were syncing too,” Hunt said.
McKenney’s also found problems with accounts, and now have fewer accounts – which means fewer entry points for the bad guys.
Reports are a critical point of visibility and driver of action. “I started in the licensing section of the reports just because you know the hard dollar savings. So maximize those. That was really easy to interpret. That’s the one that helped me identify over subscriptions, duplicate licenses, people that shouldn’t have had licenses. Now I’m moving into the core product, and so looking at the Exchange reports and OneDrive reports. We’ve identified users that are at the maximum amount of their Exchange size, so 100 gigabytes. Last time we checked a few years ago, most people were in the 30 to 40 gigabytes mailbox size. It’s a problem that has been happening behind the scenes that our users are having to deal with. Because we didn’t have visibility, we didn’t have plans to even address it, and so now we’re moving to those Exchange reports. With Microsoft Teams and OneDrive reports, we’re finding all of these things that are operational issues for our end users, but they weren’t big enough issues to even be engaging our IT group. We’re proactively addressing those.”
Driving technology adoption is the ultimate value that excites Hunt. “When we look at our construction field people, we have enabled them with iPads, iPhones in some cases, 360 degree cameras, health alerts, all these great tools. We just don’t know which people are adopting them and which aren’t. CoreView immediately told us,” Hunt explained. “Take a user group construction foreman. They’re supposed to be using OneDrive because that’s where all their documentation on how to actually do the building is. But 40% of our field hasn’t logged into OneDrive this year, which begs the question, how are we building these buildings if they don’t have the specifications? It looks like an internal user construction project manager is literally going out to the files and emailing them.”
CoreView will drive this adoption so all are on the same technology.
CoreView also plays a key role in optimizing McKenney’s user of the platform. “I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of value from our customer success, especially with the on boarding process,” Hunt concluded.
Founded in 2004, iVision’s aim was to offer innovative IT services. “iVision is a technology integration and management firm that engineers success for clients through objective recommendations, process and technology expertise and best-of-breed guidance,” the company said. “Since 1948, our proven approach has ensured high-quality solutions at every stage of a building. But we know that providing the highest level of services takes the right people and a healthy environment. With this in mind, our focus is to improve the lives of our customers, employees, and communities around us through all aspects of what we do.”
Today iVision supports M365 with an array of assessments, including:
And Design and Build Services, including:
McKenney’s is similarly is all about innovation. “Since opening our doors in Atlanta in 1948, we have been locally owned and operated, helping shape our cities’ skylines and delivering high-quality, energy-efficient solutions. Self-performance of all trades, in-house shops, and over seven decades of experience have made us the top choice in mechanical contractors, providing highly efficient mechanical systems and a full range of services to meet our customers’ unique needs,” the company said.
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