Microsoft Modern Workplace has the capabilities to transform businesses of all sizes, in any industry or location. It brings together a whole host of modern workplace needs such as collaboration tools, security and data storage. There’s so much it can do, so to help you understand how it can help your business, here’s how it helped ours.
We recently completed the acquisition of another company. I will talk more about this in future posts however right from the beginning, Microsoft Modern Workplace played its part, and to be honest, I am not sure how we would have done things without it.
Firstly, storage of data, emails and the whole collaboration required to process high volumes of information.
Acquiring the company all started with a phone call. You could argue that I was in the right time and the right place, but it was more about connections and networking. What followed was a whole heap load of data to digest and this is where Microsoft Teams kicked in. Paul and I started with creating a Team with various channels. This meant that we were able to collaborate on the same documents at the same time, which is a fundamental long overdue feature we have all been waiting for in Word and Excel. Next, we processed all the initial calculations. We would not have arrived at some of the decisions we did early on about the acquisition if we had not had access to this data in this way.
Moving through the process, we introduced external resources and held calls with people inside and outside of the organisation. You can do this easily with Microsoft Teams, after all it is built on SharePoint, which has been around for a long time. COVID made this process easy as everyone is now used to video calling. We often shared screens and made very quick decisions on what would have otherwise waited for email responses. And to think that we used to think that email was quick.
Once the deal had been done, we started on embedding our systems and processes into the everyday life at the newly acquired company. This involved everything from domain names, web sites, and emails; through to documents and accounts. All of which was made easier using Office 365. Once the right details had been added to the correct Microsoft Tenant, we were able to start collaborating straight away. Even though we were bringing two domain names together, they both appeared in one place. We were able to immediately start sharing our Teams structure with our new colleagues. Culturally, this meant that although we were bringing two companies together, we were able to act as one team. Massively important for this process to work.
Now, we have started to help the growing team provide the same outstanding net promoter score our current clients enjoy here at String (it’s 96 and we are very proud of it), to our newly acquired clients. All of which, will include work, that our colleagues will predominantly complete in Microsoft’s Modern Workplace.
So in short, that’s how Microsoft Modern Workplace helped us. From file sharing and collaborative working to video calls and easy access to company documents and data, it made our lives easier and the acquisition process smoother. Maybe a tiny bit less stressful too.
As for growth through acquisition, I recommend it. Just make sure you have a strategy that involves a great IT company like us and Microsoft Modern Workplace to make the whole process easier.
Steve
