Forum Discussion
M365 Management
Hi all,
Cards on the table—I’m a Product Manager for a solution focused on Microsoft 365 management as well as driving optimisation into innovation. My background is sysadmin-heavy, which led me to building the solution before moving into product.
I’m not here to pitch anything but genuinely keen to hear from the community:
What are your biggest pain points in managing M365, Azure, Copilot?
What challenges do you face with user optimisation, processes etc?
Are you using any tools today to help, or is it mostly manual?
What is one thing that would make your life so much easier?
Would love to hear what’s working (or not working) for you, as it would help me massively!
Thanks!
1 Reply
I would say one of major problems that all Microsoft products have is lack of visual identity and visual/UI sync between apps.
I always joke with my IT community that Microsoft products like Windows, Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and Admin Center, Azure Portal look like their front end was built by different departments that never had a sync meeting.
I saw product release documents for various products, and they are impressive. But to me Microsoft transformed in last decade form very stiff, conservative company into release behemoth.
Changes are released so fast, and products have changes on such a pace that causes a lot of frictions from end user experience perspective.
I think as Product Manager you should push for a "simplification" of products. Have templated configuration for some products. Small and mid sized companies that don't have dedicated IT guy, need out of the box experience.
Also for me finding a feature within some app is a challenge but, for some less techie users that is even more the case.
OneDrive for example has horrible UI and design. I found out that 8/10 users think they are syncing Desktop, Documents, and Pictures, but that is not the case, as to verify that you need to dig into layers of OneDrive
Outlook has so many different versions, Legacy, New, MacOS, iOS, Android and they all differ, from capability standpoint, and from visual point I don't even need to say.Admin center - every Monday I log in and find something either changed location, changed the name, or changed functionality. I know there is a lot of product changes but just to keep up with changes it takes effort.
Intune - why does it takes sometimes 5min, sometimes 6h to see applied change? Why there is a need to just mount features on top of them, but core issues are never resolved?
Other vendors make MDM products with simplicity in their mind. You need a report, click on report, specify what kind of report do you need and that's done. You need to remove an app, you either click on it and remove it, or push a script.
You need inventory sync you run webhook and push the data there.
That for sure is not always the case in Intune.
