How good is SharePoint Online for Service Distribution Companies?

Well, there has been a drastic change in terms of companies relying on Intranet solutions to boost efficiency, collaboration and competitiveness. Even large organizations are moving towards cloud solutions so that its easily accessible to users as well as cost-effective. Who would say no to Office 365, SharePoint Online and Skype for Business? That’s like oxygen for a workplace.

It’s not difficult to integrate several locations into a centralized system. SharePoint Online and Office 365 can be setup in less than 30 days’ time without any hassle. If it was an on-prem deployment, this could have taken at least -3 months’ time.

Intranet Requirements

Some of the key requirements for a Service Distribution Intranet Portal are:

1. Shift Calendars
2. Document Management System
3. Company Wide Collaboration System (Yammer or Microsoft Teams)
4. Workflow notifications for dispatch or operation teams.

This is collaborated with Office 365 – Microsoft Exchange Online to provide email integration so your notifications are well received in no time! And if SharePoint Online can be integrated with top-notch solutions such as Dynamics 365 – Field Service App; it would be wonderful.

Dynamics 365 Field Service capabilities

Cost-effective scalable support for growth

From our experience, we never had customers downsizing the number of Office 365 licenses. They start with 100 licenses and keep incrementing year by year. We have a customer that started with 100 Users and now, they are over 1800 users which is amazing as they have moved all their workforce to Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Also, companies need not worry about the storage too. Compared to other cloud providers, scaling up is easier, but scaling down is a difficult task. Microsoft Office 365 has the capability to scale up and down users without any hassle.

Also, companies can rely on Skype for Business Online for meetings. It’s anyways coming along with the Office 365 Package, so why spend a lot of online meeting apps such as Cisco, RingCentral, Zoom etc. You could save around $10,000 a year!

Integration possibilities

Thanks to Microsoft’s capability on integration possibilities. SharePoint can be integrated with couple of top-notch solutions available in the market today. If you are an existing Microsoft Dynamics AX or GP customer, lists or document libraries can be integrated with the required features of ERP to ensure you have lesser manual interventions when working with data on SharePoint and ERP simultaneously.

Data Storage reliability

Do you know that your Office 365 data is stored in different Microsoft cloud locations? You don’t have to worry about natural calamities anymore. Your data is always safe with Microsoft and cost effective. Imagine if you are running on on-premise applications. It’s going to be a nightmare during the disaster periods! And guess what, by choosing Office 365/SharePoint Online, you don’t have to rely on separate disaster recovery suites!

Lesser IT overheads

Relying on custom/on-premise solutions to integrate several work locations is going to take forever (At least 6 Months). With Office 365, you can kickstart in less than 2 months’ time! It has never become so easy to migrate new users ahead of domain and network integration. Also, no more VPN setups required for Office 365 access. Also, you will be able to get shared calendars, meeting room management and complete Skype for Business Online feature to all the users who work in your organization irrespective of the work locations.

Also, to make things even more appealing, introducing Business Intelligence capabilities will be a great move for every organization in the future. Since Office 365 apps are hosted in Azure, Business Intelligence will become seamless and offer integrated functionalities. Microsoft Power BI comes with Office 365 subscriptions (Starting E3 Plans) and is proved to be cost effective suite.

Recommendation

As mentioned earlier in this blog, our experience shows companies never downsized their users in Office 365 but kept increasing every year. Employees are more productive without offloading several basic maintenance tasks to Office 365. It becomes an inevitable part of your work environment!