Office 365 Consulting and Customization Services

Our Office 365 Consulting Services team is headquartered in Houston, Texas and we can remember when a few years ago our team finally felt the Office 365 platform of services was ready for prime-time consumption. We were excited and started recommending it as a solid solution that would help our clients and potential clients to reduce total cost of ownership associated with their Microsoft Office suite of solutions. These savings aren’t just through licensing as we saw it, but also through reduced need for hardware, support, maintenance and elimination of future migrations. Our excitement about this solution was often met with an old guard mentality wanting to maintain the illusion of control over their content and concerned about security with the cloud. Since then, we’ve seen the collapse of oil and gas prices in our hometown and the old guard being swept aside by leadership looking to streamline operations at every level. Suddenly, the cloud is no longer a dirty word and our Office 365 services and solutions are flying off the shelves. 

Over the last two years we’ve seen a big uptake in Office 365 Migration work. Here at Entrance we made the transition to Office 365 and performed our first Office 365 migration 5 years ago when we first moved to the cloud. Since then, we have started to rack up our experience and now offer a full line of Office 365 Services and Office 365 Migration Services. Per Share-Gate, 61% of companies are running either full cloud or Hybrid SharePoint Environments. This same study asked respondents what is keeping their organization from moving to the cloud and 36% said security concerns, but 12% of these companies aren’t even checking for security breaches in their environment.

When you start doing your due diligence on migrating to Office 365 or are ready to pull the trigger on an O365 migration contact our team of O365 managed services experts to assist you in making an informed decision based on experience.

Our Office 365 Consulting Services

Office 365 Onboarding

The Entrance O365 Onboarding Team helps customers onboard core services and plan successful adoption. Customer tasks for onboarding activities are common for most accounts, which makes it easy for our team to identify any potential issues with your environment that may require additional configuration.  These common tasks include:

• Pre-Onboard Inspection – Assessment of current environment
• Domain Name System (DNS) settings
• User provisioning
• Email flow
• Integration with your Identity management solution
• Email migration from eligible source environments

Our O365 pre-onboard inspection is used to identify any additional tasks that are required for your infrastructure prior to onboarding. If any tasks are identified, our onboarding expert will advise you on how to complete the tasks before onboarding can begin. Examples includes potential need for updated hardware, software or network.

Office 365 Training

There are a lot of training providers on the market, but we do it differently here at Entrance by providing our clients customized training that is unique to how their team will use the different O365 Services. There are so many services offered in O365 and in each service, so many tasks that can be accomplished. Don’t throw generic training at your users by someone who doesn’t work daily in the services being demonstrated. Instead, let our team of O365 experts customize a training plan that will walk your users through the pieces of the solution they will actually be using. Having a trainer who works in and configures the services will lead to more thorough and meaningful knowledge transfer sessions. Services provided:

• Train the Trainer
• Deployment of Video Learning Suite
• End User Training
• End User Documentation
• Power User Training
• Power User Documentation
• Administrator Training
• Administrator Documentation

Office 365 Performance & Security Audits

Our relationship with our clients sometimes begins when they notice something that they’re not quite happy with within their environment. Maybe it’s slow performance, or maybe things have gotten a little bit out of control with the service they’re providing their end users, could be security is a concern orsimply that users are complaining. Our Office 365 consulting services can help your business figure out how to maintain your ROI, how to increase user adoption, and figure out how to improve your O365services.

Any journey of improvement starts with understanding where you’re at and where you want to go. We offer comprehensive planning and roadmap O365 services that help you lay out a straightforward plan to get you where you want to go. Our O365 consulting services include:

• O365 Assessment
• O365 Envision & Plan Roadmaps
• O365 Health Check

Office 365 Customization

We’ve been living and working in Microsoft’s cloud for five years now. We pride ourselves on making best practice recommendations to our client’s even when that means fewer service dollars in our pockets. We loved custom master pages as much as the next guys and they were fun, engaging, high visibility initiatives, but today with O365 best minimize your looks and feels to Composed looks or suffer the consequences when Microsoft pushes an update. Microsoft continues to lock down Office 365 to protect the herd and in the process, are replacing old customization methodology with new tools. Let Entrance help you decide the best way to customize your O365 solutions to get the maximum ROI without worrying about a future update to the environment impacting your solution.

Microsoft Graph – Integrate Office 365 REST APIs powered by Microsoft Graph into your own app to connect to files, calendars, mail and more.

Office Add-ins – Extend the functionality of Office with a web app that lives within Office applications.

SharePoint Add-ins– Extend the functionality of SharePoint with a web app that lives within a SharePoint website.

Office 365 Connectors – Connect your apps to the conversations of Office 365 users and engage them with actionable content and updates from your service.

Office 365 Governance

The primary cause of intranet rollout failure is not technical execution, but failure to provide organizational change management. We can help you plan and execute governance, strategy, training, and communication that is often the cornerstone of your project. Whiz-bang features and technical wizardry have their place, but repeated experience with our clients proves that the key to success is to work closely with stakeholders and get them excited about any and every project. We strive to make our client’s professional lives easier through:

• Governance
• Change Management and End User Training
• Power User Training
• Administrator Training

Office 365 Flows

There are a ton of great applications out on the market place, but no good way to connect them all and push data between the solutions. Let me introduce Microsoft’s Flow. Connect your favorite Apps with Microsoft Flow. Past are the days where Microsoft tried to force you into only using their ecosystem. Now, you can use all their solutions in any browser and Flow is the next link in the chain when it comes to playing nice with others. It allows you to work less, while doing more. Create automated workflows between your favorite app and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data and more. Turn repetitive tasks into automated, multistep workflows. Here are just a few of the services you can connect with outside of the Microsoft ecosystem:

• Twitter
• Dropbox
• Salesforce
• Basecamp
• Box
• FTP
• Google Drive

Apps using Power Apps

Work today is not your father’s workplace. Today, we are connected 24/7 thanks to the tiny computer we all carry in our pockets. It’s ability to keep us constantly connected combined with the nearly limitless computing and data storage available to us in the cloud and we can truly say our work experiences are nothing like they used to be. The business has more applications and more data than it has ever had before and yet it seems, the business continues to clamor for more. Many applications aren’t mobile friendly, don’t talk to other systems or perhaps not accessible when they need to be. It seems there continues to be an innovation gap. There are a few reasons for this including the fact there are never enough skilled developers, our business data continues to grow by leaps and bounds and the inherent lag in getting software rolled out in organizations.

Microsoft’s answer to this issue is PowerApps. It allows the business and IT quickly create apps that work on any device using a Microsoft like experience. You can start from scratch or work from their templates. Much like Flow, it has built in connections to all the Microsoft cloud solutions and many of the most popular non-Microsoft solutions. We are excited at how much time is reduced from app concept to app deployment.

Power BI Dashboards

We help our clients capitalize on the technological trend away from disparate, unconnected data sources and towards an integrated pool of data that can be easily drawn from to make better decisions for the business. O365 offers users Power BI as a unique tool in reporting and analytics because it can serve as a familiar user interface for users to enter data and can bring data in automatically from many different systems and visualize it in useful ways. Our team can help your business with:

• Dashboards in Power BI
• Interactive Visualizations with Microsoft Power BI
• Dashboard Tiles in Power BI