Mastering Microsoft 365 in all its Complexity

In today's rapidly changing digital landscape, organizations are embracing Microsoft 365 as a comprehensive platform to enhance security, collaboration, productivity and business outcomes. Alongside the undeniable benefits come the challenges of keeping up with its dynamic nature as a cloud native service.

There are two major challenges organizations often face when managing their Microsoft 365 environment. CDW has perfected the art of keeping clients ahead of the curve.

Microsoft continuously updates Microsoft 365, introducing new features and security controls. While changes promise improved user experiences, they also present a challenge – how do organizations keep up with it all?

Keeping a pulse on Microsoft's continuous stream of announcements requires dedicated effort.  The Microsoft 365 Roadmap is the official channel for all long-term change announcements across all cloud instances. The Microsoft 365 Message Center streamlines all announcements of crucial updates, enhancements, sunsetting of features and changes across the Microsoft 365 services in each individual tenant. It's here that organizations can get a glimpse of what's on the horizon and understand how these announcements impact their current usage.

Interpreting these announcements is a skill in and of itself. How do you decipher the implications of these changes for your organization?

This is where CDW's Cloud Managed Services (MS) for Microsoft 365 shines.

We partner with your organization to understand your strategic plans and how Microsoft 365 can help you achieve your goals. CDW closely monitors the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and Microsoft 365 announcements. We translate these announcements into actionable insights for you.

When an announcement has an impact on your operations, we don’t just notify you, we work hand-in-hand to ensure you understand the changes and plan for adoption, rollout and support in line with your needs. Organizations should be empowered to harness the potential of Microsoft 365 without being blindsided by its continuous evolution.

Microsoft 365 services have grown far beyond Exchange Online for email. This growth requires broad and deep expertise about a plethora of services that impact organizational processes. 

Today, Microsoft 365 delivers a diverse and complex suite of enterprise services including Exchange Online for email, Teams for meetings and collaboration, SharePoint Online for information sharing and collaboration, OneDrive for Business for file sharing, Intune for unified endpoint management and Entra ID (recently renamed from Azure Active Directory) for identity and access management across all cloud apps.

Microsoft 365 packages these valuable cloud services together to provide a comprehensive solution that enables users to optimize productivity while protecting organizations with strong security controls.

The challenge is finding a dedicated specialist for each service to configure and manage these components properly, and coordinate change impact across services and user populations. This poses a problem: finding and retaining the skill and expertise to do so.

CDW recognizes that assembling a team of experts for each workload isn't practical for every organization. That's why we bring the right talent to the table. We not only provide standard daily operations, administration, and incident and service request support, but also bring in the proactive and advisory services, with focus on continuous improvements.

With CDW Managed Services for Microsoft 365, your organization can gain access to our technology experts who specialize in evaluating, configuring and managing these workloads, taking the burden off of your team. This shared expertise ensures that you have the right knowledge at your disposal, regardless of your in-house resources. Our certified experts bring access to a wealth of knowledge, discipline and industry insights. This network ensures that even the most unique problems have solutions, helping your organization derive the utmost value from your Microsoft 365 investment.

To help address the challenges of Microsoft 365, CDW provides a unique value-added service that sets it apart. Inscape by CDW is a cloud and SaaS management platform that provides centralized visibility into your environment and allows you to control multicloud costs with ease, including Microsoft 365 user provisioning, licensing audits and robust reporting capabilities. Inscape gives your organization key insights into your Microsoft 365 environment and multicloud footprint, enabling a deeper understanding and visibility so that you can optimize productivity and make smarter business decisions.