Can Microsoft 365 help you achieve effective and practical information management?

Microsoft 365 has become a game changer for organisations worldwide, transforming how they manage information. At a base level, Microsoft 365 offers the building blocks for an out-of-the-box enterprise content management (ECM) system through SharePoint. SharePoint’s document libraries have version control, folder structures, metadata, audit logs, permission levels, and check-in/check-out features, all essential for efficient information management. Additionally, Microsoft Purview enhances 365 data governance and compliance with features like data loss prevention, data retention policies, and sensitivity labels.

However, these building blocks of Microsoft 365 tend to be overwhelming and expensive when you strive for practical information management and compliance. By practical, we mean making compliance seamless for users through structure, automation, and data insights – something integrated into their daily activities, without requiring a SharePoint administrator’s constant intervention. Unfortunately, achieving this level of practicality isn’t always straightforward with the out-of-the-box capabilities of Microsoft 365.

Challenges with out-of-the-box Microsoft 365

While Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Teams have benefited from improved data controls in recent years, standard deployments still struggle with:

• Difficulty maintaining an effective and scalable Information Architecture.
• Issues with maintaining consistent and secure permissions.
• Duplicate content leading to inefficiencies.
• Clunky experience in Microsoft Purview, relying on document pattern matching.
• Excessive time and effort required for administration tasks.
• Manual or expensive document tagging for compliance, causing unnecessary user frustration and hassle.

To answer the question “Can Microsoft 365 help you achieve effective and practical information management?”, the answer is yes. But trying to achieve it alone is like drowning yourself in a sea of bricks, and it requires you to invest significant time, effort, and money. The never-ending struggle with achieving practical information management and compliance led us to partner with New Zealand’s Information Leadership, an award-winning Microsoft solutions provider, to bring the iWorkplace for Microsoft 365 solution to Australia.

What is iWorkplace?

iWorkplace, available through Professional Advantage, enhances Microsoft 365 with a comprehensive set of frameworks and tools to help organisations manage and protect information at scale more easily and cost-effectively. It unifies your enterprise document and records management system (EDRMS), compliance, and collaboration systems into a user-friendly platform, effectively fusing Microsoft 365’s building blocks to create a “full-functioning city” with working and governed services.

How can iWorkplace help you achieve practical information management and compliance?

iWorkplace is a strategic complement to SharePoint Online and Teams, augmenting its capabilities to fulfill specific EDRMS requirements. It delivers superbly on these key points: user experience, compliance, and ease of administration.  

Simplify user experience.

• Single, consistent digital workspace within Microsoft 365 to find and collaborate on content and file things for compliance.
• Automatic compliance. Files saved in SharePoint and Teams folders have data classification, security, and retention policies automatically applied. Your users only need to save the file. It’s that simple.
• Use familiar tools better for your users, like SharePoint and Teams, allowing seamless navigation and faster user adoption with tighter integration and more control.
• Simplify tasks for records keepers or information managers who may not necessarily be SharePoint Administrators. iWorkplace allows them to update case files such as personnel files, jobs, assets, meetings—anything repeatable—without needing admin rights.
• Enable tailored search functionality that delivers accurate results using metadata, keywords, and contextual information.

Achieve practical information protection and compliance.

• Use iWorkplace’s apps, frameworks, and design patterns for a successful platform from day one with set-and-forget outcomes that also scale with your organisation’s needs and growth.
• Meet regulatory standards across content libraries.
• Enable automatic classification of files, with metadata automated based on a file location.
• Set up automatic retention and disposal rules that span document libraries.
• Use native Microsoft 365 retention labels to protect files from day one, then dispose of them to a schedule. iWorkplace’s Smart Labels automate this at scale and with tricky use cases that are hard to administer out of the box with Microsoft 365 E3 or E5.
• Control excessive use of OneDrive and use OneDrive Manager to move files into the right workspaces in SharePoint.
• Provide structure and usability to control and manage content and collaboration at scale in Microsoft Teams.

Enable easier and cost-effective IT administration.

• Provision SharePoint team sites automatically from pre-built templates, either cloned from other projects or Information Leadership’s stored smart template, reducing administration needs.
• Rapid rollout of taxonomy resulting in 80% reduction in implementation time.
• Utilise existing Microsoft 365 security configurations.
• Enable end users to onboard guests into Microsoft 365 securely to allow external users into the environment.

iWorkplace elevates SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams by delivering a customised, user-friendly, and compliance-focused EDRMS solution that users highly value. By integrating the various components of Microsoft 365 into a streamlined and efficient system, iWorkplace makes practical information management attainable and effective for organisations of all sizes.

Learn more about iWorkplace here or contact us for more information.