The question of when (and how) to start using a Microsoft Office 365 Management Platform is a common one, especially given the number of native, in-platform tools M365 provides. Why invest in a partner if you have the capacity to manage M365 at your fingertips, you might be wondering? And at what point does it make sense for an IT team to source third-party help?

Before we dive into specifics, though, we should note that the greatest factor to consider – particularly when it comes to working with an M365 platform – is the size and scope of your organization. If you’re a small but mighty team of a dozen or so employees – predominantly using Microsoft tools like Outlook and Microsoft Teams (but little beyond that) – it probably doesn’t make sense to bring on a management partner. (As much as we’d love to help you!)

If, however, you’re a massive conglomerate with multiple brands, branches, and office locations around the globe, you’ll undoubtedly benefit from having a third-party’s support with managing M365.

And if you fall somewhere in the middle? Well, here are a few factors – a quick checklist, if you will – to help you decide whether or not it makes sense to start working with an M365 Management Platform.

1. Limited IT Bandwidth: If your IT team is on the smaller side, aka a 10-person-show supporting 10,000+ global employees, it’s essential to help reduce the chaos and allow your team to go full speed. With a strategic partner at the helm of your M365 strategy, you can ensure you’re going to get your M365 under control by gaining full value, full oversight, and able to go full speed.

2. Using Complex Tools from Microsoft 365: Again, if your organization is relatively tight-knit and your M365 usage is limited to basic utilization of apps like Outlook and Microsoft Teams, odds are, there’s no need for you to bring on a M365 Management Platform. But if you are in the latter category of PowerShell scripts ruining your life and is a cobweb of terror. Utilizing a M365 Management Platform there are hundreds of built-in management actions, all with a single click. Eliminating your worries around PowerShell vulnerabilities or the need to grant full Global admin rights to that person you just hired (no judgements).

3. Needing Different Licenses for Different Company Divisions: Quick, how many licenses are inactive in your Japan office? How about those 10 new people that are joining next week – do they really all need new licenses? Having a M365 Management Platform allows you to stay on top of this less technical task – Office 365 license lifecycle management – with a simple, granular report that can span across all departments, divisions, and geographic locations.

With CoreView, for instance, you can segment a single-tenant into Virtual Tenants that might reflect a department, region, or even an office location. By breaking your tenant down into these smaller groups, you can more easily decide what users are able to see and act on (which is much less intimidating and time-consuming than trying to tackle the organization as a whole!).

All of this can free up some well-deserved time to focus on more strategic tasks, allowing you to rest easy about optimizing your M365 investment and ensuring adoption across your business.  

4. Aiming to Better Track Microsoft Teams: If you’re concerned about Microsoft Teams sprawl, or looking to more constructively keep track of your company’s Teams usage, few solutions are going to be easier or more effective than bringing on an M365 Management Platform.

With CoreView, for instance, you have deep, action-enabled M365 reports at your fingertips – allowing you to better understand, and thus improve, Teams-related workflows. You can also implement more personalized, Role-Based Access Control and roll out Teams governance policies pretty quickly and smoothly, ensuring your use of Teams is safe and optimized.

5. Looking to Prevent Data Breaches: Another huge reason to bring on an M365 Management Platform? Elevating security.

Again, if your organization is a large one, preventing and avoiding security risks and potential data breaches isn’t exactly easy to do on your own. But with a Management Platform’s support, you not only have more precise control over who has access to what (by way of Virtual Tenants, for example), you also have the capacity to set up security monitoring and incident responses any and every time a security breach might occur. Want to know when your employees are signing on from unfamiliar locations, or the CEO’s email inbox has been accessed? We can set up alerts for exactly those types of actions, helping you stop data breaches before they even begin.

6. Managing Hybrid Environments: Striving to balance accounts and users from the cloud as well as on-premise – e.g. managing a hybrid IT environment – is far from simple. We get it. But with the help of an M365 Management Platform like CoreView, you can take the guesswork out of if, when, and where to make updates or changes – connecting your on-prem Active Directory (or AD) to CoreSuite and thus managing on-prem and cloud-only objects at once.

Do you check any (or all) of the boxes above and think you might be in need of an M365 Management Platform? We’re here to help. Request a CoreView demo today.