Empowering your business with Teams

Meet Northland Kindergarten Association:

The Northland Kindergarten Association or NKA, has 25 kindergartens between Kaitaia in the Far North, to Ruawai in the heart of Kaipara.

NKA were concerned about their IT setup, so they approached an IT Alliance member with the below key issues:

  • They were running out of space on their server.
  • Their system was out of date.
  • They weren’t working in the cloud which meant poor communication and knowledge sharing.
  • Each of their 25 kindergartens couldn’t connect and learn from each other.

They asked an IT Alliance member to do a risk analysis of their organization and to help them brainstorm a solution.

What was discovered:

  • Together they discovered that they had a disjointed network with outdated hardware and software.
  • Each kindergarten was getting a mixed level of service and support from a variety of IT support services.
  • To make matters worse each kindergarten team shared one email address and could not access each other’s files.
  • They had limited ability to communicate well which means work kept getting reinvented and upskilling was difficult too.
  • Their cybersecurity was not where it needed to be either.

They needed a solution that made their systems more secure, connected their team and helped bring their collective knowledge into one place. 

Empowering Kindergartens with 365 Teams:  

The IT Alliance member suggested to NKA that they could use Microsoft 365 Teams to empower their kindergartens using the following steps:

  1. They developed a rollout process of new hardware.
  2. Everyone got a new email address and were set up on Microsoft 365 Teams.
  3. They provided training with one-on-one support during the implementation.

Although they had only intended to create a safer network and shared resources, NKA was able to use Microsoft 365 Teams for so much more! 

How it helped them:

They moved all their documents into the cloud using a feature of Microsoft 365 called SharePoint. It helped them organize their document management so that they could share and manage content across the entire network of kindergartens. This saved them time, improved consistency and made their documents more secure.  

They also improved training, communication and connectivity within their team. They had a whopping 120+ attendees at their annual conference. Due to Covid, they had to host the event online.  Microsoft 365 Teams came in very useful. Again, training was provided, and they had two run throughs so that they could help anyone with login, microphone and camera issues. Their event went on for 5-6 hours and went off without a hitch!   

The Education Review Office, and five other national guests were able to present vital information easily. They broke out into subgroups for discussions using the meeting room function. Their CEO even pre-recorded his video message.

One of the risks of always being online is that they were worried that they might miss a quality engagement. Luckily 365 Teams gave them the ability to engage. They were able to raise a hand, ask questions in the chat and follow along from home. Overall, it was much less expense than an in-person event!  

The end result:

Overall, implementing Microsoft 365 Teams into NKA empowered their association with better cybersecurity, improved communications, empowered resource sharing that saved time and decreased event costs whilst maintaining event engagement. Not bad for one system in one place!

 “We were grateful to have streamlined our processes and we now have one point of contact for all our sites. We enjoy having a consistent service throughout our organization. It means that the team understands what we need, and we know we are providing top notch service to our kindergartens.”

Lloyd Gurr Head of Projects, Northland Kindergarten Association.  

If you would like to learn more about how 365 Teams could support your business join us for a FREE webinar through the EMPOWER Series. Click here to register.

AVOID DOCUMENT DISASTER: Empowering your Business

The POWER Trifector Solution for Document Automation

The environment in which we operate has significantly changed. Businesses in Northland have been driven to embrace remote working.  

Every good business is constantly on the hunt for new ways to improve their efficiency, keep their costs down, and increase productivity and profit and decrease risk.

What if we told you that you might be sitting on a goldmine of opportunity?

Having Microsoft 365 is bit like owning a spaceship. You know what it’s used for, but how to use it? Let’s unpack it a bit further.

Most Common Problems

The most common problems we hear of through our IT Alliance network around the country are:

  • Putting your documents into the cloud, document management and approvals
  • Empowering your business while working remotely
  • Managing emails and automating them
  • Keeping your company cyber safe

Would it surprise you to know that 50% of IT Alliance clients underutilize their Microsoft 365 Teams account? So why pay for something, and not use it all? You can join in our Empower Series here to hear more, but for now let’s start with document management and approvals.

Making the most of Your Microsoft 365

Sharepoint and Power Automate are both free with your business Subscription. Did you know you could use them in these ways?

Microsoft SharePoint – SharePoint (their free document management system) can seem overly complicated because it can offer so much. But it doesn’t need to be so scary.

You can start small and use more functionality as needed or as you grow.

Basically, it’s a platform that offers content management and collaboration.

It helps with reducing duplicate files, gives you remote access (needed more than ever!) and allows you to work on the same document at the same time.

Find out more about SharePoint here: https://ita.co.nz/sharepoint-shakedown

Microsoft Power Automate is another free app that allows you to automate workflows across applications. You can use it to connect email and instant message alerts, synchronize files between applications, copy files from one service to another, collect data from one app and store it in another, and much more.

Templates are available to get you started. Efficiency is key for sustained success across businesses and Power Automate assists this by simplifying workflows with the automation of repetitive tasks.

Power Apps – is a low-code application development platform that integrates with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure and more.

With Power Apps, web and mobile applications can be built without writing code. Instead, you can use pre-built templates and components with drag-and-drop simplicity.

Power Apps has been described as a bit like a meal delivery kit. The ingredients are pre-measured and chopped. The instructions are ready to go. All you have to do is prep and cook.

Because Power Apps has advanced logic and rules built-in, development time is cut by 70%. In some cases, it takes just a few hours to build an app. Or you can customize one of the pre-built templates in just minutes. Plus, Power apps connects to hundreds of business systems and databases. Here are some impressive statistics to show how Power apps is super useful.

  • 188% ROI over three years3
  • 74% reduction in app development costs4
  • 2 hours of line-of-business employee productivity improvement per week5

Real Business, Real Change

Quality Food Services is the largest exporter of butter pastry in NZ.  Up until a few years ago they were struggling with their documents and approvals as they were complicated and manual.

They used SharePoint to create an online document management system that had version control, search features and navigation that made finding documents and using them easier. 

You could track your changes so that everyone was always up to speed on any project.

Power Automate helped QFS to automate their business processes and approvals using tailored notifications and automated data entry, saving plenty of time and increasing the accuracy of the approval process.

Power apps helped to collect information and display where everything was in the process so that the project could be managed much more easily.

All of this saved them time, money and decreased their risk significantly.

Where to from here?

If you have a process that you are helps make your document management process a little less of a headache, speak to us here. You are welcome to register to attend our next Empower Session here.

Microsoft 365 Streamlines Business and Reduces Spend

For our Northland customers, when doing business online, you have many options for available software and systems.

You might turn to one solution to handle online meetings, another to drive collaboration, and yet another to manage your content and workflow. It can get confusing. Plus, when you are duplicating tools, IT spend can mushroom unnecessarily.

Microsoft 365 aims to offer a single, all-in-one solution. This article highlights the benefits of streamlining your software needs.

Formerly Office 365, Microsoft 365 is for home, business, enterprise, and education users. Microsoft touts that the software helps businesses reimagine the way they work.

Consolidating many business apps can encourage productivity, support collaboration, and cut costs. Doing away with the fragmentation of many different vendor apps your business can:

Benefits of Microsoft 365

  1. save time;
  2. manage projects, communications, calendars, and more in a unified platform;
  3. simplify deployment;
  4. cut tech support and IT management challenges;
  5. budget better with one invoice for the one solution.

Let’s talk in more detail about all you might handle within the Microsoft platform

Microsoft 365 Replaces Your Many Apps

There are many online business tools you can replace with Microsoft 365:

# 1 Communication

First, there’s Business Voice to replace your traditional phone systems. This secure and cost-effective VoIP service enables users to make and receive calls from any device. You can use a laptop, mobile, or desktop, while continuing to use the same number as the desk phone. You can dial in numbers for call conferencing, AI voicemail, transcription, and real-time captioning help, too.

Microsoft 365 also lets users pop into meetings immediately within their Teams channels. They can easily start a phone or video meeting, and during the meeting, they can also share files and PowerPoints. Plus, integrating Outlook contacts and calendars helps efficiency and scheduling.

# 2 Collaboration

Microsoft users are already relying on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. With Microsoft 365, these files are easy to use and share online. Collaborate in a shared document, in real-time, with version control.

Within Microsoft Teams, users have a whiteboard and screen, too. Custom backgrounds and the Together mode are particularly useful during the pandemic. Blur the background on a video call or choose a custom setting. Or sit in a shared digital background to feel as if you’re all actually in the same space together again.

This can replace GoToMeeting, Zoom, and WebEx, as well as document management software, Box, or an on-premises file server.

# 3 Apps and Services

Integrate bots, automate workflows, or manage data with more than 700 productivity, project management, industry-specific, or business department apps.

Businesses can connect data to improve agility with Power automate doing repetitive tasks. Power BI makes it easier to discuss and visualize data.

# 4 Emails and Planning

Microsoft Exchange does away with on-premises email, Web hosting provider email, or Gmail. Plus, people can stay better organized with integrated notes, documents, and calendars.

Instead of tracking things in Trello, Basecamp, or another project platform, use Planner to stay on top of progress.

# 5 Backup storage

Your Microsoft 365 subscription includes 1 terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. That’s equivalent to 6.5 million document pages (such as Office files, PDFs, and presentations). Plus, your workers can share, locate, and collaborate in SharePoint.

# 6 Cybersecurity

Microsoft 365 also offers secure messaging and multi-factor authentication. The “1,000+ security and privacy controls” help meet industry and regulatory standards. That’s without needing Proofpoint, Mimecast, or Barracuda, or other advanced threat protections.

Simplify your IT infrastructure with Microsoft 365. Reduce software duplication, cut back on software licensing costs, and regain storage capacity.

Every business is different. It’s always best to chat to a IT Professional about your business needs first. To find out more about Microsoft 365, and how it can help your customers, please call us or email us here to book a 1:1 free, no obligation appointment.

The Dynamics of Microsoft Dynamics 365

What’s so great about Microsoft Dynamics 365?

We all know the person in your Northland organization who has been there for eons. They know everything about their customers, from their names to their life stories. If they weren’t there – you would be ringing IT Support to troll through some emails!

Or the vibrant young team member who talks to her customers on a daily basis, and could tell you anything about their buying habits. Loves people, hates paperwork.

These team members are great when they are in your company. The only trouble is, when they leave, so too does all the knowledge they carry around in their head.

Then in walks this fantastic, well-rounded, new member of staff. This staff member has the ability to remember anything – almost like they have a 360 view of the customer! But the best thing is they also share it with everyone. Suddenly customer retention is up, sales have increased and efficiency is through the roof.

Who is this new member of staff and where can you find them?

Meet Dynamics 365

The new and easy to implement Microsoft cloud based system that ensures that your organization is:

  1. More efficient
  2. More customer focused
  3. Increases sales.

1. Get to know your customers:

Did you know that only 30% of businesses actually know their customers well? Wait what????

What does this mean? In studies that Microsoft carried out, it showed that only 30% of businesses actually understand their customers buying patterns, and know them really well.

This is largely because the systems they are currently using don’t easily talk to each other, are time consuming to pull reports from, to navigate, and hence only give one side of the story.

Imagine being able to see your customers buying patterns, the marketing that excites them (and that they open), the way they interact with your website, and your social channels all in one place.

Imagine then being able to create automated and clearly defined marketing campaigns that are specific to your customer’s habits.

This all leads to more specific, customer focused, automated marketing campaigns, and hence increased sales.

2. Improve efficiency and reduce your costs

What organizations love is that once they get in to using Dynamics 365, they find that they have a lower cost to serve their customers.

This stems from having more efficient systems, a greater knowledge base, as well as an increased ability to offer self service to customers with customer portals.

How does it improve efficiency? By introducing the Power Platform, PowerApps and Power Automate, Dynamics 365 is easily able to automate the paper and manual processes, and hence significantly increase productivity.

Making the customer experience easy and effortless, also ensures customer retention, and let’s face it, retaining customers is much easier than gaining new customers.

3. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is simple!

People don’t have time or the energy to learn even more software, and with Dynamics 365 they don’t have to.

The beauty of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that it works hand in hand with the Office suite and is such a familiar experience that the uptake within businesses is consistently high.

Plus, internal stakeholders find that they have increased productivity, as they are not jumping from one application to another.

With the new way of working remotely, you can access everything anywhere you need to and on any device, as it is all cloud based.

Dynamics 365 is an easy add on to your existing Microsoft cloud platform

4. But isn’t it a hassle to change?

Other CRM systems have made people think that it takes lots of time to change and to see the benefits.

With Dynamics 365 you can roll this out in small baby steps, focus on what’s most important now, and start with what your organization most needs. The benefits are immediate, not months away.

Any CRM system will require a shift in culture towards your people actually sharing knowledge, however Dynamics 365 has been found to be so simple, effective and easy, that the uptake leads quickly to increased sales and that is ultimately a benefit for everyone in the company!  

What next?

Every business is different. It’s always best to chat to a IT Professional about your business needs first. To find out more about Dynamics 365, and how it can help your customers, please call us or email us here to book a 1:1 free, no obligation appointment.