Since the beginning of 2019, we here at Altitude 365 started our own business area for Onboarding and Adoption. We see that it’s the next natural step for Microsoft’s cloud services. Our customers have landed well in the technical platform and even though we always helped with the onboarding and the adoption of services, it is time to really roll up the sleeves and invest in the field!

During my years at Altitude 365, I have worked a lot with data-driven insights, not least when it comes to onboarding and adoption with customers. It has previously primarily been done as point-in-effort. We have run workshops and before the meeting I have compiled information from the usage reports that we then dived into and prepared action plans from. We’re taking it to the next level by launching our 2 insight reports that retrieve data every day and which can therefore be run as a service instead of as a one-time activity:
• Cloud cost management
• Usage Adoption

As an organization, when you move over to Microsoft’s cloud services in Microsoft 365, a whole series of new possibilities but also issues open up. Questions you didn’t have to deal with before. Who should have a license? How many should we have? Do we need to buy several new or do we have enough already? Who will pay for what?

With our Cloud Cost Management report you get many of these answers served on a silver platter! We begin our journey in the overview where you see how much money is spent on Microsoft 365 licenses per month and overall against which different keys (company, department, country and manager). Here one can form an overall view of distribution and costs. On the two following pages we find different types of compilations of the information from the directory service (Azure AD). The purpose of these tabs is to be able to clean up and get as uniform of an environment as possible. Something that is a requirement for you to be able to rely on the cost distribution.
In addition, within Microsoft 365, all this information is used as your new digital business card, so it is particularly important that the information is correct!

You can also see the information about yourself and others in Delve. Go to https://eur.delve.office.com/ and click on yourself in the menu on the left.

OK, with a clean AD we can start to look at the cost distribution in the report! For example, we can filter out all the users we are interested in through the filters at the top of the report and then mark individual licenses to see which ones have that license or within which combination of licenses this particular one exists. This is very practical to for example find combinations that can be expanded with more licenses, which in turn keeps the number of combinations down (which is easier to manage).
You might also find a combination used by plenty of users! If so, consider creating a standard package out of those licenses, that you then can provide using a set of rules so that they’re assigned automatically
It is also very easy to find accounts that are jointly licensed that might cancel each other out. You might for example find users with both the Exchange Online Plan 2 license as well as an Office 365 Enterprise E3 license, or accounts that is missing a specific add on that everyone should have, like ATP.

Under License usage, we also show the licenses that are not assigned to any person. In this way you get a quick picture of the potential you have in your organization. For example, say that you have 10 unallocated project licenses. An excellent opportunity to perform a POC against that department who wanted to improve their project work!
For organizations that have a so-called EA agreement, it is an interesting tab to ensure that more expensive licenses are allocated, so that they get the maximum effect from your investment.
For organizations with a so-called CSP agreement, this tab is interesting because you can dispose of the licenses that you do not use and thereby save money! If you’re unsure of which kind of agreement you buy licenses through and are interested in buying them over CSP, please get in touch with our sales team and they’ll be more than happy to help you out with any questions!

Under the tab named license – Matrix distribution, we just list a large matrix distributing all licenses and summed costs at different levels. You can sort by Country, City, Company and department. You can combine these or look at them individually. It is e.g. relevant to disassemble the department “Sales” if there are several departments with names under several different companies, but it may be as interesting to know how large the amount and number of licenses used by the sales departments is combined!

Why should you work with Adoption and why have we built a report for this?

Basically, any organization that goes over to Microsoft 365 soon discovers that the big (and fun!) Work only starts after having the technical platform in place. It is now that you can really begin to reap the fruit of your work and begin to gain value through more efficient processes and working methods. The tools are in place, they are maintained automatically but it does not make any difference if everyone continues to work as before.
The adaptive cruise control for the car that automatically keeps the distance to the car in front is excellent but only if you dare to trust it and use it. Here you can count the PPU value! PPU stands for Price Per Use. Let’s say you buy a T-shirt for 99 SEK and one for 499 SEK.
In the next 2 years you will use your more expensive T-shirt 50 times, but the cheaper T-shirt was more rewarding to buy and not quite as satisfying to wear, so you have only used it 8 times in the same period.
The cheaper shirt therefore has a PPU value of SEK 12.3 (it has cost SEK 12.3 to use the shirt per occasion). The more expensive sweater, however, only costs SEK 9.98 per occasion it was used.
Similarly, we can assess Microsoft’s 365 services. If you buy the largest license, Microsoft 365 E5, and only use email then it is a fairly expensive deal! However, if you use Teams, classify information (automatically in some cases), get a hugely secure login with risk-based criteria and much more, the license’s PPU value will in many cases be lower than if you purchased a cheaper license.

OK, these were many words to just say that if the value you got out of a service exceeds the cost of the service, it’s a good deal.
Who doesn’t want to do a good deal?

This is why we developed the Altitudes Usage Adoption Report! We have lots of information on utilization in Office 365 but without first refining the information and interpreting it, it gives no real value.
We have taken our experiences and quantified them in the report’s various calculations and assumptions!
Let’s dig in!

The landing page – here we begin!
The first thing to meet us in the report is a filter page. Here you set up report-wide filters, ie things that apply throughout the reports pages! The case might be that we only want to pursue adoption against one of the companies, selected departments or against certain places.

With the filters in place we come to an overview page that gives us just that. An overview of the maturity of the business. To what extent are the different services used in Office 365 and how do they stand against each other?
We have calculated a degree of maturity on a scale between 0-5, which means that you can compare OneDrive with Teams for example, even though these services are completely different!

Under Org – Overview we show different parts of the organization and its maturity levels. The purpose is, among other things, that we want to be able to re-use knowledge that already exists in the organization. For example, let us say we have 3 different warehouses in the same company. They are at 3 completely different levels in Teams usage! One hardly uses Teams at all while another uses Teams lots. By putting together representatives from the different departments, we can, with fewer resources, centrally drive the adoption issue and use people who have already started using the product and who are also already working on similar tasks!
A powerful way to involve our employees as well as using the knowledge we’ve already gathered in house!

On Org-Inactivity, we are continuously showing accounts that for the last 30 days have not used anything at all in office 365! They haven’t read an email, not visited a SharePoint site, not sent a message in Teams… You get the idea. They are simply completely digitally frozen.
Here we have 2 choices:
• Onboard the users
• Remove the licenses

To onboard a person means that we bring them on board the service ship. The service is being used and the PPU value is strengthened! This is usually the desirable scenario!
We’re not talking about getting productive yet, that comes later. At this stage it’s all about introducing the service at a very basic level.
One alternative is to remove the license from the user. This is relevant in many aspects as well! It can deal with people quitting but we have not yet removed their licenses or we have set too high licenses against service accounts.
The goal is rarely that this should be SEK 0. There are always those who are on parental leave or people who have received a license but have not yet started their employment and are therefore expected to be inactive.
However, you can only see sums if you use Cloud Cost Management as well, because it is via that one we feed price information.

Activities – Overview
On this tab we have gathered suggestions to drive different types of Onboarding and Adoption engagement.
Here we combine degrees of use by users and then assess combinations to suggest activities.
One example is users who use Teams in the web or via installed client in the computer, but not via the mobile. Proposed action is to help the user get started with Teams in the mobile. Something that should be as obvious as you wanting email in your mobile.
The actions are updated monthly and are always created in such a way that they are self-remedied if you rectify them. In the example above, users who have started using the mobile phone for Teams disappear because they are no longer inactive in that area.

The championship tab lists the users who have achieved maturity 5.0 for any service!
It is our potential champions, or ambassadors, for Office 365.
Cloud services are constantly changing, so it is not a viable way to constantly set up new pilot groups for small updates. You usually want to set up a championship program with innovative people in the business that can help drive the development.
The report helps us filter down the lists of potential candidates!

Maturity level – Overview
There is much more the report can show and I would be happy to present a demo of it in a Teams meeting. To finish up the blog entry, we should just look more closely at this tab.
Under Maturity Level – Overview we can see the same thing as in the overview at the beginning, but here we can set up our own filters. This is relevant because we can now set up settings for a baseline and then measure the success of an adoption project. For example, we can pinpoint a target group. Let’s say that the target group consists of users in a particular location, but only users with Office 365 E3 licenses and we exclude 2 departments. Then we can set the report to show us only the target group and their maturity for the period. Let us pose that the maturity rate combines at 2.0 for Teams and SharePoint. We wish to increase the degree of maturity to 2.5 within 6 months and can now use the report to inform successes to the steering group month by month and to verify that we have reached our goal after completion of the project.

Do you want to know more?
More information about the reports can be found on our marketplace!
You can of course always contact me or one of my colleagues so we tell more and / or show a demo.