How investing in the Microsoft ecosystem can make your business Win

Many small and medium-sized businesses think of IT as just a toolset that you use to do real work. You need spreadsheets, email, word processing, and other tools to assist you in getting your real work done. The reality is that IT is the ecosystem that enables you to build processes with technology that help the company win!

Fortune 500 companies are often using the same Microsoft 365 platform that their smaller competitors use, but they know how to invest and implement Microsoft’s platform to help them outcompete and win in the marketplace. But effective use of this platform isn’t limited to just enterprise-sized companies, any small or medium-sized businesses can use this same platform to build a business that is lean, efficient, and ready to win in a cut-throat market.

In this first part of a five-part series on the benefits of leaning into the Microsoft ecosystem, we address a scenario that is far too common.

Part One: The Small Business Nightmare

Here’s what most small businesses face with decentralized IT. Let’s imagine a company called Widget Pro Inc, a small company with 30 employees. They rely on CAD software to produce designs for a client. They have no internal IT department and just rely on managers to get their team the tools they need.

John Doe is a new employee in the design department. On his first day, he is given a new computer by his manager, Sally. He is given credentials to a local account on the computer, and signs in. His manager tells him the COO makes their Office accounts, and she’s in a meeting right now, so he needs to wait until after to get his email setup. Over an hour later, John Doe can sign into Outlook, but now he has two sets of credentials for his Windows Profile and his Office account.

His job isn’t to write emails though, it’s to create mechanical drawings in AutoCAD. His manager helps install AutoCAD for him. He can’t actually sign into AutoCAD though, only the CEO has admin access to their AutoCAD account, and they forgot to ask him to make him an account. Now John Doe makes another cup of coffee and gets to keep waiting.

Now it’s nearing the end of the day, and John hasn’t done any work. He finally gets his AutoCAD account and signs in. His manager helps him connect to the S drive, their file share. John is rather shocked to see that not only are all the companies AutoCAD drawings there, and immediately accessible, he also sees a folder called “QuickBooks”. He’s curious, and tries to open the folder, and finds dozens of QuickBooks files that are exposed to the whole company. There's even an excel spreadsheet in there mysteriously titled “passwords.xlsx”

Now it’s time to go home for the day, and John hasn’t actually worked for a single minute of his first day. He knows tomorrow he will certainly run into more things he doesn’t have access to yet, and it will probably be weeks before he’s setup to be fully productive.

This story may seem exaggerated, but it is the reality for tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses in America. For IT professionals, the most heartbreaking part of this situation is that most of these businesses already pay for the tools they need to build enterprise-quality IT, but they haven’t implemented them properly.

Widget Pro Inc was already using Microsoft 365 and had access to all of the tools they needed to get a new employee onboarded and productive within hours, not within days. They could have had a single, centralized identity to manage access to Windows, Office Apps, and the appropriate file shares if they had been using Entra correctly. They could have setup Single Sign-on between Microsoft 365 and Autodesk. They could have automatically deployed the correct CAD software through Intune to the laptop. They could have saved potentially dozens of hours, and thousands of dollars, if they had proper IT.

If this sounds at all like your business, know that you have the tools to be just as streamlined, secure, and efficient as any of your larger competitors. You just need IT professionals like F1 Cloud Solutions to help you to turn your disparate tools into a real IT ecosystem that is ready to help make your business win.

So, what’s the solution?

Everyone knows you need spreadsheets for reporting on and analyzing data, word processors to write reports, software to build your sales slide deck, and email to communicate with your customers. What many smaller businesses don’t know is that the real magic of IT happens when you can use technology to build processes around your toolsets.

Every company has four things that good IT needs to manage and secure:

1. Employees

2. Devices

3. Data

4. Software

   
   

The Microsoft platform has the capability to help you manage and streamline every one of these areas. In this series, we will explore how you can use Microsoft tools to streamline your business and manage all of these areas.