Ever since Office 365 emerged on the cloud, organizations have invested in the Office platform to transform their workplace and boost productivity. With 100 million+ active users and 70% of the Fortune 500 companies leveraging the Microsoft platform, Office 365 is fast becoming the standard for enterprise productivity. But is this robust platform being used to the fullest? Have organizations unlocked the true value of Office 365 to transform group of individuals into high performing teams?

As seen in the image below, the market trend shows that Yammer has the lowest adoption trend. With Office 365 teams coming into the picture, Yammer adoption is expected to fall even further. “Though there is widespread adoption of Office 365 features and individual components of Office 365, especially Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business, there is still room for adoption”, says Chirag Barhate, Director – Product Engineering at Maarga.

As your organization traverses the adoption journey, Maarga takes you through the SPEAR – a 5 staged framework allowing you to have a structured approach to roll out the collaboration platform and ensuring you meet your adoption goals.

Watch the webinar on “5 Steps to get the Enterprise Embrace to Office 365” and get the keys on how we at Maarga use the “SPEAR” approach for guaranteed adoption in the organization.

Maarga’s 5 Step Adoption Framework

Stage 1: Strategy: Understanding or defining the strategic roadmap of your Office 365 implementation begins with understanding the culture of your organization. Do a cultural assessment of where you are at and how do you want to travel ahead. Do you want to be known for your quick turnaround and knowledge sharing or be a social organization?

Have your executives informed and get them on the same plane as your organization’s goals. Then move on to define your social goals – what you foresee Office 365 being used for in your organization, and what you expect Office 365 to drive in a big way in your organization?

Stage 2: Prepare: Plan and prepare to define your goals at the organizational level by increasing the amount of accessible knowledge within the organization. The approach should be to go with the business view rather than the components and features of the platform like Office 365.

Defining the goal encompasses many collaboration scenarios like implementing effective search or the way hierarchy of information is organized thereby making it easier to get the information at the snap of the fingers. At Maarga, we leverage the collaboration almanaque to structure your definition of social goals, firstly, to define the goal, validate it and then decide how to scale it across the organization.

In the preparation phase, have your Governance Roadmap in place. How are you mapping the organization’s governance standards and onto the Office 365 platform? Identify your Superusers or champions who are advocates of the platform to lead for others to follow. Identify the best in business and nurture them to drive other users.

Stage 3: Enable: With your champions to lead, the next is for you to enable them with adequate information so they can go ahead and influence a broader audience. Run awareness drives time and again with videos, infographics, and sessions to get traction and visibility so users get on to use the platform effectively. It is this approach we at Maarga follow, bearing fruitful end results.    

Stage 4: Activate: Be it file sharing or a more complex process involving sales or marketing teams, communicate to your teams to get going with the process. Guide the teams so they are completely in sync with the process and start performing them as part of day-to-day activities.

 Stage 5: Reinforce & Sustain: Having worked so hard to get your teams working on the Office 365 platform or its components, you do not want to just let it go away. Build your community of champions and community of leaders and do not forget to reward or recognize them for all their efforts.

From our experience, we have seen that many organizations have rewards and recognition program linked to their Internet and collaboration platforms. With the active users and bloggers being rewarded, your organization is on the path in embracing the Office 365 platform.

In the course of the webinar, when participants were asked to vote on the most troublesome area of Office 365, it was interesting note that:

• 60% had issues in organization collaboration and
• 40% faced problems with file sharing capabilities

Whatever be the adoption issues, our experts delve deep into them, analyze them and offer customized solutions to optimize Office 365. With Office 365 adoption not uniform across industries, watch the webinar and learn how Sam – Senior Adoption Specialist at Maarga and his team, helped address business problems for a utilities major and a manufacturing company in their adoption journey.

Remember, whatever be the platform your business runs on, with Maarga, its adoption made easier.

Watch the webinar recording here:-

A comprehensive ‘Collaboration Almanac’ was reviewed in the webinar. If you wish to get a copy, please send a mail to marketing@maargasystems.com