Earlier this year, we did a survey to find out how IT departments are being affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, besides the obvious effect of organizations shifting to a remote workforce. 2/3 of respondents told us that their IT budget was decreasing. Yet at the same time, years of digital transformation are taking place in a timespan of months. Many organizations also told us that they see an opportunity to consolidate onto Microsoft products; but it’s difficult to find the time to plan these moves. They told us that their time is split between many things today: managing their tenant, providing end-user support, troubleshooting and resolving issues, managing change, and discovering features.
In a brand-new video, Karissa Larson, a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft 365 admin center team, talks about how you can improve IT efficiency and agility and maintain visibility through delegation. For example, you can empower users by enabling features such as self-service password reset (SSPR). We’ve been promoting SSPR for a while because we know it saves time and money for every organization that enables it. In fact, it can potentially save your organization a lot of time and money. That’s just one form of delegation that makes an admin’s life easier.
In addition to delegation, we’re focused on reducing the amount of time it takes you to perform every day and not so everyday actions. You told us that you spend a lot of time in the Microsoft 365 admin center looking for things instead of doing things. So we built a whole new search experience that shows you not just new results such as navigation items in the admin center, but also relevant and recommended documentation related to your search. Karissa describes the new search experience and gives a look at what’s coming for search by the end of 2020. Karissa also talks about the work we’re doing to enable you to monitor VIP, or priority accounts, and to help you with domain and DNS records management.
Flexibility is all about seamless integration with tools you use today. Karissa describes integrations that provide you with quick admin access across Azure, Teams, and Exchange through Microsoft Cloud Shell, the ability to sync message center posts to Microsoft Planner, and service incident integration with ServiceNow.
I don’t want to steal any thunder from Karissa and team, so watch the video, which is packed with demos on everything I’ve mentioned. Then, complete our survey and give us feedback and help us prioritize our work. You can also register your interest in joining a virtual roundtable session that will take place in October.
and learn about best practices directly from the product teams.