Starting Over? Here’s the Roadmap We’d Follow
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies to help you build a better workplace and get more out of your Microsoft subscription. My name is Mitch. I'm joined by both Matt and Mike today.
Mike:Hey, everybody.
Mitch:Say hi.
Matt:Hey, everybody.
Mitch:How are you doing today?
Matt:I'm doing pretty good. We've been doing a lot in the studio. Mike has been doing it, so we're getting back in at it.
Mitch:Yeah. We're back to back meetings today. So to top it all off, we're recording a podcast episode all about if we were to start fresh and articulate the vision for someone trying to modernize their workplace and get from a to b, what that journey looks like and distill it down into little steps. So this is hopefully one that you can send to someone who's maybe curious about what would it look like if I used my Microsoft tools better or where do I start and kind of what should I expect over the course of the next, I don't know, couple years of improving my workplace because it is a it's not a pain pill. It's a long long term lifestyle.
Mitch:So we want to start with what are what are some scenarios? What are some times when someone might like, who's curious about Microsoft, but who are some other folks who might be interested in, like, this topic? Who would this speak to in your mind?
Matt:Yeah. I mean, I'm going be putting my mind in the context of maybe someone who is a leader in an organization, maybe a technical leader, but maybe not. And they're joining the organization, and they're looking and saying, you know, the organization, oh, we have Microsoft three sixty five, but we don't use it really well, you know, and they're maybe charged with or or are looking to help improve that. Right? Coming from a, not a complete blank slate, but like, hey, we're starting fresh, if you will.
Matt:Right? That would be one persona that I I think this would talk to. Another one would be somebody who's switching from, you know, another vendor, another provider, and looking to use Microsoft three sixty five, or maybe they weren't using anything before. I'm a small really small business and I just had one laptop and, you know, another couple things, but now I've got multiple employees and I really need to take that to the next level. You know, what does that look like for me?
Matt:So that would be another one. Mike, do you have one?
Mike:Maybe you've been using it for a while. You've got email and some of the basic stuff. Maybe you're even using Teams a little bit, but now you're ready to really get organized.
Mitch:Yeah. That's actually one of the more common ones that I see with leads who come in where it's not like anything's on fire. It's more about we have these tools, we feel like we could use them better, and we want to invest in this. Like, we we don't wanna find ourselves years down the line not having moved this needle, and so we want to focus on it for for a little bit. Okay.
Mitch:So that that kind of illustrates who might be interested in this. The journey that we're taking people on is sort of what are the basics, what are the core, like, mindset things that people need to adopt and that needs to be sort of organization wide, and then how does that cascade into the different areas, and how do you push that further beyond what we would describe as that foundational stuff.
Matt:Yeah, and some of the things we're going talk about are going to be very end user focused, some of it are going be leadership focused, some of it is going to be IT focused, right? We're going to kind of cover all the bases in here that I think will really do a good job of helping someone who is just starting to think about using that, to think about it a little differently maybe than what they have in the past.
Mitch:Sure. Okay. I'm pulling up our Foundations course page because you probably have heard us talk about our course a little bit. Actually, right now, it's like the ad that comes right in front of our podcast episodes, so they've probably already heard about it listening to this episode. But when we talk about where to start, I do want to sort of scan through some of the topics that we talk about in there, briefly touch on them, so we kind of cover what do we view as that, like, everyone should know these things so that we can talk about what's beyond that easier.
Mitch:Makes sense.
Matt:Just to be really clear, this is the foundation of what everyone like, you're setting the perspective of why did we buy this suite of tools? What is it trying to accomplish for us? What is it going to do for us? And that's what this kind of covers.
Mitch:Yeah. So the first module is all about from knowledge black holes to collective brainpower. So going from a world where you rely on people to translate information between each other, and it's a very person to person based organization, and you might have people who are central, who have been around for a long time, and you rely on them to be a resource center for people, and people go to them for questions, and they rely on them for helping get people unstuck, basically. And that person translating that information then puts the knowledge into someone else's mind, and then it cascades from there and people spread it through osmosis. And while that is doable, it's feasible, like you can run a business that way.
Mitch:What we promote is the concept of instead of only relying on people connecting with each other in that way, how do you store and work on the information in a central way that is organization based instead of tied to a user so that when knowledge gets created at that user level, it becomes what we call as a knowledge black hole where something gets lost and your whole organization can't benefit from it. And so we try to promote the concept of store in an organizational storage place, whether that be SharePoint or Teams and stuff like that. We talk about that all in the course quite a bit. But it's that's the first step of saying, we're feeling pain because all of my people, things are disparate, people are disconnected. I'm frustrated because the tools aren't helping me feel like we're collaborating and being more cohesive, and I want it all to be in one spot.
Mitch:And so that concept is the thing that helps start that path. So that's our first module. You might hear that and think that feels really fluffy for my people. Like, my people just they just need to understand how to use the tools. And we think that's a misconception.
Mitch:That's something that people actually miss, is that their whole team needs to understand this. Do you want to talk about that?
Matt:Yeah. I mean, the reality is that you're spending a lot of money on a tool that has lots of components. And and as we go through more things in the course, there's lots there, but why are you doing it? What can they expect to get out of it? Setting that expectation can help them ask the right questions, can help them have the right mindset that when they're going through training and looking at these tools, they can start to see and paint the picture of how this should work for them.
Matt:It is really, really important because most people, that's the biggest problem they have is that too often they don't get the benefit of what we're talking about, collaborative knowledge, the knowledge repositories getting created, just because they don't know that that's what the expectation is.
Mike:Yeah. I think the real thing for me is you're turning something from just a cost or an expense, an IT expense, into what can actually be an organizational investment.
Mitch:Yeah. It's a big mindset shift for sure. So get everybody on that page. Module tool is all about translating that into communication. How does that affect how we actually have day to day communication in our work?
Mitch:So we talk about topic based communication, where instead of talking directly to people, you talk in the context of a topic that is shared amongst people who should have access to that topic. We've talked about that before in some other podcasts, but that builds upon that organizational knowledge. You want to talk about Smart Meetings?
Matt:Yeah. So, Meetings is the next module and it's really all about Meetings are a huge part of businesses, they're a huge part of what people do work and how they get work done. How do you do that in a way that adds value? And how do you use these tools to add value? And that's really something that, you know, we talk a lot about the process and the thought process that you should take into meetings, and it really just drives home what you can do in the context of meetings to just make them more than just two people, three people in a room having a conversation.
Mitch:Yeah. It can be as simple as make sure everything's recorded
Matt:Yep.
Mitch:And use AI well, stuff like that. We talk about all of those methods in that. Beyond that, the next one's a chunker. It's Microsoft tool overview. So there's a small level that everyone should understand theoretically about each tool.
Mitch:So we go through each one of the tools, say, here's how it fits in the suite of tools and here's what you should understand about how they all intertwine and what what their main purpose is. So that that one is a couple hours worth of guidance there. And that helps people know when they need to do something at their work, they might have a Rolodex then in their brain of, oh, I think there's a Microsoft tool that might be able to help me with that.
Matt:This is the tool that'll do it.
Mitch:Yep. The two last modules, one is about project process and people. So that talks about the frustration people have when they are trying to use tools that are meant for one type of work and not for another type of work, and it causes a lot of pain and questions and self doubt of am I able to do this? Is this the right tool? And we talk about how each one of those are a little bit different.
Mitch:And then last one, do you want to talk about managing everyday work?
Matt:Yeah, so last one is probably one of the biggest ones we get asked questions about. It's really taking Microsoft three sixty five and saying, okay, I can do email, I can create documents, I can do these things, but how do I actually manage work? How do I manage how things are getting done? And so it just really talks about some of the various tools that are available to you, how you might approach them, how you might think about them, and just getting tasks done. It's exclusively about that.
Mitch:Yeah. It's like a glimpse of a day in the life of if you were to use all of these tools well
Matt:How would it look like? What would it look like?
Mitch:Yeah. So that's a, like, flyby. Hours worth of content in just a couple minutes. What we're trying to illustrate there is those are the core tenets that we believe everyone should at least have some concept of and understand in order to do the things that we're about to talk about, like what is beyond these these foundations? What should someone say, okay, I've done a small amount of training for my people.
Mitch:I might not have taught them click this button to do this thing, but where do we go beyond that?
Matt:Yeah. As you said, that part of what we're doing is really just getting everyone all aligned. So I gave the thing of, you know, I'm a new leader in my organization. I've got a 100 people maybe in my organization. They all may be coming from different backgrounds about how what they use.
Matt:Somebody used Gmail in their last job. Somebody used, you know, spreadsheets for everything. Everybody has their own different background, and that course or what you would do if you did that if I did that myself, is just resetting and saying, everybody's got the same baseline. Everybody's got the same understanding of why we're buying these tools, what we expect to get out of them. Beyond that, you can go in a lot of different directions.
Matt:Right?
Mitch:And one thing before we go too far is none of what we talk about in that course is like super private things that we haven't talked about before. Like, if you're we're 48 episodes into this podcast. If you've listened to them all, you probably get what we're talking about when it's when we're talking about these things. Our goal was to try to package it up into something that was just a couple hours for someone to take. But don't expect that we're like keeping a bunch of secrets in that course.
Matt:Yep.
Mitch:We try to share it as much as we can.
Matt:Yep.
Mitch:Back to you. Take me on what's beyond foundations.
Matt:There's a lot of different ways you can go when you get now you've got everybody on the same page and they know what's going to be what's about to be happening. There's a lot of different ways you can go. One way, and it's probably one of the first things that I would do. It's one of the first things that we do when we did when we started to grow and started having to have more meetings, spend money and effort on creating a great meeting experience. Have rooms dedicated to meetings, have technology, so monitors and conference room equipment that allows an employee to step in, schedule a meeting in a room, walk into that meeting, start the meeting with no barriers, turn on meeting recording, and have it transcribed very effortlessly.
Matt:And that's just about meetings. We also talk about doing it for people who are at home, right? We give all of our employees a stipend to go buy a good headset and to put a good mic at home, you know. If you have employees that are working remote, working from home, give them the resources to have a nice webcam. Right?
Matt:Yeah. That can make a huge difference in how work gets done. And it can seem silly and it can seem like that's not that big of a deal. All I need is my phone. There's no question, you need more.
Matt:You want to have some level of quality. You don't need to spend a thousand dollars per employee or per user trying to make it, you know, phenomenal, but, you know, you want something nice.
Mike:Yeah. Something like that pays off. Is that like it's nice for the employee to have that, right? They might feel good about that, but that pays off for the business. Yeah.
Mike:Pays off for your it pays off for your customers
Matt:Yep.
Mike:Because they're getting better audio quality, better video quality. Yep. All of those things are are happening, and that has like, not having to ask somebody to repeat themselves or figure out their camera situation or whatever that is goes a long way.
Matt:And even if you're an organization that's focused on in person meetings, you're still gonna do a whole bunch that's not. Yep. Like, you just cannot get around it. You couldn't get around it before COVID and before the pandemic, etcetera. You really can't get around it now.
Matt:Right? Like, you're going to have it, so set up something that's nice.
Mitch:Yeah. Let's put some numbers around that because I think people might be wondering if they're small, they haven't invested in conference room equipment before, stuff like that. What are we talking here? I think we spent we have like a Logitech Rally Bar with a nice speaker and camera that like Yep. Focuses in on people and then a couple microphones on the table.
Matt:Yep. And a big TV.
Mitch:Yeah. Yeah. And a touch screen on the table that we can use to like join the meeting and control.
Matt:Yep.
Mitch:I think we spent like $7 or something Yep. Like that. Right? So for us
Matt:But that's the only conference room we have.
Mitch:Right.
Matt:Right? Yeah. Well, that is one of the premier conference rooms. That has every That is the space. Right?
Matt:If I had three or four other conference rooms that were smaller, whatever, I might do something a little bit different for some of those. But, yeah. I mean, that's I I would say $7 is on the sort of upper. Like, if you have a boardroom, a bigger because ours is I would call it medium size.
Mitch:Yeah.
Mike:If you have
Matt:a big boardroom, you're going spend more. Yeah. If you have more smaller rooms, you'll spend a little less.
Mike:Right? I wanted to clarify one thing. You called it the premier conference room. It's actually known as Prestige Worldwide.
Matt:Oh my goodness.
Mitch:Oh, throwback.
Matt:Yeah.
Mitch:Yeah. Yeah. Good times, you guys.
Matt:We'll have to talk about that later.
Mitch:Yeah. So $7 for that, something like that?
Matt:Yeah, something like that is Don't probably
Mitch:look to us to install your cameras like that. We we we kinda did it ourselves, but kinda had someone help. So it was like we we made it work. Unfortunately, we know enough about technology to to rig it together. And then individual.
Mitch:So if I were to articulate what you should give someone as a stipend for, like, getting their desk set up well, if I'm looking at a webcam and a microphone, it's something like $200, $300,
Matt:maybe is what I would say. I mean, I think I think a nice the cheapest you can do is probably a nice headset with a mic, boom mic kind of thing, and a webcam. I think you can do that for $200 ish. Yeah. You can go way higher.
Matt:Like, there's way way fancier ones. Yeah. There's way cheaper ones. Some people, you know, like their AirPods or their whatever, Raycons, whatever, with a mic. Some people, you know, I don't really care.
Matt:What I care about is that it's quality audio, etcetera.
Mitch:You don't buy AirPods with a Windows computer though. That's that's a mistake.
Matt:That's a that's a recipe together. For Which yeah. Incompatibility.
Mike:If you're interested in what the bulb crew uses Yeah.
Mitch:Let us know.
Mike:We'll put that together.
Mitch:No. I want I want people to tell us. Otherwise, we're gonna
Mike:waste Yeah. Much Of course.
Mitch:Yeah. So the physical equipment is so we talk about digital tools and then bring it back into the real world with you kinda actually need some equipment to facilitate this Yep. Beyond a laptop usually. What's next? What should someone be looking at investing in?
Matt:Yeah. So I mean, the very next thing, like, let's say you got your meeting stuff sorted out or maybe at the same time is probably what I would do, you know, then we're talking Teams. Like, Teams is a cornerstone of all of this stuff. You need to get that set up and working and and doing what you want. I'm not talking about spending a ton of times analyzing and planning and big rollout.
Matt:Start following the guidelines. Create Teams for projects. Create Teams for for for groups of people that work together. Start having them focus on using that stuff, you're gonna see a transformation in your business by doing such such a thing. You're gonna see a drop in direct message chats, you're gonna see a drop in emails, you're gonna see an improvement in people's awareness what's going on, collaboration, creativity will go like that.
Matt:You'll just see that stuff happening. I would definitely focus on that as my next main focus from a Microsoft three sixty five technology Yeah. One
Mitch:thing, you're painting it a little simply of like once you use this tool and set it up, you'll experience these benefits. There's a little more nuance than that because there's some habits, there's some causing people to work differently than what they're used to working that takes some time and effort to get over. And so I'm, again, just painting it as it's not like a snap your fingers and it's there. It's something that if they have the right mindset and approach and start to work on communicating this way, that is what enables a lot of the other teams, the parts of teams to work really well.
Mike:Yeah. So having that mindset that you get out of something like the Foundations course and letting that sink in, But then, like, maybe one of the next things would be implementing some governance in your environment so that you have that structure, so that people aren't tempted to go off the rails and come up with their own mindset. Right? They're so you use some governance and structure to kind of keep people inside, between the ditches. Right?
Matt:I was making it kind of simple. It's it's not something that's going to happen overnight, but I I think exactly as both of you guys are saying, it's it, you know, you need to get people to start using it and to change that mindset. And then as they change the mindset, you have to put up guardrails. Right? You have to provide some guidance to them about what that is, which kind of leads into the next part that I would focus on, which is IT governance.
Mitch:It becomes the compliance team.
Matt:It's not much that, it's that I want my teams, my my employees, to have a consistent experience and have a quality experience. Right?
Mitch:By locking everything down and yeah.
Matt:Mitch Mitch Mitch Mitch Mitch
Mike:There's definitely much less to experience once it's all locked out.
Matt:Okay. Now, guys, there's a lot of tools within Microsoft three sixty five that allow you to protect your business and to protect your data, protect your devices that a lot of organizations are not taking advantage of. Either because they aren't at the right licensing level, so some of it is a cost thing. Hey, I gotta buy more to be able to get this. Some of it is just not understanding.
Matt:Right? People oftentimes will use MSPs to do a lot of those things. MSPs oftentimes just do what you tell them to do. And if you don't know to ask them to implement MFA, which is eventually gonna be a default, you can't get out out from it. If you don't tell them to do it, they won't do it.
Matt:If you don't tell them you want conditional access policies to stop somebody in Djibouti from connecting to your data, they're not gonna set that up. Right? And so spend a little time to understand what you want to get out of it from that from that side, the compliance, governance, security end of it, and work with your MSP or work with your IT department to maximize that as much as you can without impacting people. Right? Like, Mitch, I think you're joking.
Matt:I'm pretty sure you're joking because we're not too super I think anytime locked anything down.
Mitch:Anytime I have to integrate with any sort of tool in our tenant, I have to put in a request. And every time the message is something like, please, Lord, take me away because this is miserable to me and I should be able to just click this button and integrate it.
Matt:Everyone in the company should just be able to click a button and integrate every everything.
Mike:I think at a high level, the basic thing that people need to understand is like, yes, protection is important, risk mitigation is important. Yeah. And there is a cost associated with it. But that is not nearly as exciting as the benefit, the value that you might create through standardization and structure and everyone having a consistent quality experience, doing things the same way and building that organizational value.
Matt:And the risk mitigation of 400 people in your organization at all various levels of IT knowledge and knowing that they're not gonna get themselves into a bad situation.
Mike:I know, but nobody nobody likes to think about that. It's not exciting. It's like the compliance team Can we
Mitch:save this for another podcast, you guys? Was me here.
Mike:No. And nobody goes, yay. I wanna spend a million dollars on that.
Matt:No. But my point is they already spend it. That's that's my point. No. I There's features that you are there already.
Mike:We're completely off off the rails.
Matt:You should
Mike:I think the thing I'm trying to say is something like, it's not that you shouldn't do it. That's not what I'm saying. It's that we have to figure out how to get people to understand that they're gonna spend some money in order to not spend way more money later when the worst fear occurs because they didn't.
Matt:Yeah. And all I'm encouraging anyone to do is to say, work with your MSP to find the the low hanging fruit that's easy to do that Why didn't
Mitch:you just say that? I agree with that.
Matt:That is what I'm saying.
Mitch:I'm just I'm messing with you.
Matt:That is what I'm saying.
Mike:Whatever that low hanging fruit though is putting some sort of crazy wild burden on Mitch. Yeah. I'm just requested.
Mitch:So I'm just playing my role in this team. Yeah. I'm I'm obligated to speak for the common man who has been oppressed
Matt:by Oppressed.
Mike:I'm just happy to not be on the compliance team.
Matt:Yeah. So anyways, that's enough of that one. That's one's probably not as exciting to people, but I think it's honestly, especially for small to midsize businesses, it's a huge area that they're lacking. We work for companies where all we're doing is an application integration. We've told them that there's a challenge and it's taken them years to get to the point where they go, oh, yeah.
Matt:I probably do want to do something about that. When they could have protected themselves or done something different or managed it or standardized to get more value way sooner.
Mitch:Yeah. You'd be surprised how many times we hear something like a client saying, well, I wanna make sure my stuff is secure and they don't have something like device specific policies set up where someone from any computer can log in to their account. And they're like, why would I ever need that? I only ever use my computer. Can we set that up?
Mitch:And their IT is like, well, what do you mean? I have alerts set up on if someone else logged. And it's like, no. We're trying to prevent something here. So let's create those policies.
Mitch:And it doesn't have to be super complex. It doesn't have to be No. Extravagant.
Matt:And the big point that I'm trying to make is Microsoft three sixty five allows that.
Mike:Yeah.
Matt:Yeah. And it's definitely a thing that I would consider, look at, try to utilize, investigate to whatever level you're comfortable with. There's organizations that work with only external users and only other like, there's a whole wide gambit. I'm not trying to prescribe that you have to do one thing or the other. Just be aware it's there.
Matt:Look at it. It would be one of the things I would look at if I would start from scratch for
Mitch:sure. Mhmm. Okay. So let's recap. We went through foundations, we talked about what's beyond, and one of those things is physical.
Mitch:IT, physical technology to help with meetings and stuff like that. And then you talked about from an IT compliance, you know, governance standpoint, what else is there?
Matt:Yeah. So the next big one, and I think it might be, you know, the big remaining one is intranet, SharePoint, communication sites. You know, we've talked about it a lot in the past. You know, once you get everybody collaborating and doing the everyday work regularly, the next thing you need to do is be able to communicate about that. About what's going on in the organization, how things work in your organization.
Matt:That is a huge part of what organizations lack in being effective in how they do things, and SharePoint is one of the market leading ways to do that. Right? It is built into your tool. You can do a lot with it. You can go crazy with it.
Matt:You can just be basic with it. But I would definitely be looking at how to use that and implement that across the organization to help promote that communication to an organization.
Mitch:Yeah. And we've talked about in previous episodes like what is an intranet, iterative intranet, stuff like that. That stuff is all still relevant and and good. I think what you're you're getting at here is to build on that organizational knowledge on top of the everyday work that your people are doing inside of Teams. How do you abstract and share information with your employees when you when news happens, when new things happen that you want to to share and provide updates on and have it feel like a news article.
Mitch:Right? That you want locked in time. And where do you want to have as a source for all of your resources and a place for someone to go to be able to to access what they need to do their job? And Intranet can play a big role in that.
Matt:Yep. And the last thing, very last thing that I would definitely, and it's new, it's not something I would usually recommend up until very recently, this last spring honestly, I would spend time thinking about what impact AI and Copilot can have on your business. There is a free version of Copilot. Your employees can get tremendous value by just leveraging that, just the free version. People can get even more value out of the paid version, but I would look for specific use cases, thinking about that.
Matt:And then there's the whole concept of agentic AI and all of that. Like, the this data that you're building by putting things in Teams and putting it in SharePoint and having all these tools that you've just been working towards, all of the stuff we've been talking about up until now, now can get unlocked more even more value by using AI and Copilot with that data or without that data to just take it to the next level.
Mitch:Yeah. Okay. So you're saying there's there's a scale of, like, people can get by with free, but maybe still have some guidance around how to use those free tools. There might be a subset of your users that benefit from the paid version. Mhmm.
Mitch:It's not quite a blanket, everybody go buy the thing all the time. And then beyond that, how do you leverage the organizational knowledge in an AI context? And if you have everything in someone's OneDrive
Matt:That's not
Mitch:gonna you can't get access to that and
Matt:then It's not gonna work.
Mitch:The agent won't be able to see that. So it's it it all plays together and is sort of a happy accident that happened to us where we're teaching about get everything central, and now there's all sudden tools that can be really smart and
Mike:need We were
Matt:on this train for me. We knew AI was gonna take over the world, we've been planning on it
Mitch:for Man, twisted 20 AI in his brain.
Mike:Yeah. The takeaway there is don't expect to pay for co pilot and turn it loose on your organizational content if it's all locked away in personal storage.
Mitch:Yep.
Matt:If you're doing all these things together, you're going to see that's that's this is the thing is if you're doing all of these things, you're leveraging your subscriptions great. Like, you're going to find tons of value. There's going be no question about the spend that you're you're doing on these tools and the value that it's bringing for your organization.
Mitch:Yeah. And I think there's maybe one thing beyond that we could touch on, which is on the business process side and automation side that speaks to once you have all of these core things in place and you're able to communicate well, collaborate well, and and be working well and you figure out a process that works for you, you can develop intellectual property, you can develop ways of working in systems that you can then dial way up using these tools and then your business can can take off. But it's very difficult to do that without all of
Mike:the rest
Mitch:of it. The other foundational stuff. Yep. What what is that reality that we might paint for them?
Mike:Well, when I think about some of the business process and an app side of it, I often think about scenarios where in any industry, there's like a specific domain, there are always software tools that help, whether it be trades or banking or what whatever that thing is. There are a plethora of brands out there that offer software packages that you can buy off the shelf that will do that thing really well. And that's an investment that companies often make in that thing and it does what it needs to do. And then as time goes on and they start to realize there's these other tools that they might be able to integrate with, They are looking at Microsoft three sixty five and wondering how they can automate things and connect things to those tools that they've purchased. They start to look for other packages that integrate with those industry specific softwares that they've purchased.
Mike:And so they'll get themselves in a situation where they're making an evaluation on whether or not to spend extra licensing dollars on another software package or some integration tool. And the thing that I like to make people aware of is that that's fine, but you need to be able to make an evaluation of build versus buy and know that you have at your fingertips if you're using these things all the way to their potential. You have the opportunity at your fingertips to be able to control your destiny when it comes to integrating with those other tools. It's very highly likely that you can integrate on the Microsoft three sixty five side in the Power Platform with whatever those other software packages are. Most of those things are delivered as software as a service, they're cloud based.
Mike:And so they often have endpoints that you can connect with. And then you can kind of own your own destiny. Right? It depends on what maybe skills you have in house. If you don't have the skills in house, you could pay somebody to come in and build that for you, but it can be your own thing.
Mike:And the way that you implement that can be a differentiator for you and your business.
Mitch:Mhmm.
Mike:And then beyond that, once you like, if you really tap into something and you think you have, like, a magic pillar, you can do it better than anybody else, You can even consider building your own complete package, ERP, whatever that might be, in the Power Platform or inside of m three sixty five to do that thing for you and then you can even more control your own destiny. Now, it just depends on what type of organization you are, the capabilities, skill sets that you have. But I want people to understand that they need to learn about the ability to make that build versus buy decision.
Mitch:Mhmm. Yeah. I have to listen back to our you build versus buy or, like, off the shelf versus custom versus low code and that that was one of our our episodes. And that that dilemma still exists today. I think what you're trying to articulate is there is a relatively low barrier of entry into this low code power platform world where you can spend, I don't know, 5 figures setting something up that all of a sudden automates something that you don't have to jump through five different hoops to do anymore and it does it for you.
Mitch:And then there are people that, like you said, turn that way up and they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on saying, this is core to our business. There is nothing that I could buy that will do this. I don't wanna build it custom and these tools can get me as plenty far in the Power Platform to be able to do the work that we need to do. Yep. And we've seen that before and it's pretty cool.
Mitch:But everyone has their own spot that they land on that and there's no one No.
Mike:There's there's not one answer for that question. Right? It depends on who you are and what you're doing. Yeah.
Mitch:But I think maybe the the most important part is saying, you enable that question to happen once you have your teams working well together so that you can start to lift your head up from the day to day work and say, how do we capitalize this and make it better?
Mike:Well, even just the basics from the foundations course, that tool overview, knowing and understanding what the capabilities of some of the process automation tools are, should plant a seed in your brain when you're evaluating those other software packages. Sure. Right? It's like, oh, hey, maybe I could do this another
Mitch:aspect of yeah. That's valuable. Right. You've been sitting quiet over there.
Matt:I have a meeting in one minute.
Mitch:Oh my gosh. Matt has a meeting, you guys. That does get us to the end of what we're talking about today, the topics. We're interested to know kinda what you think about this maturity, this model of of what is beyond for someone who is trying to adopt these Microsoft tools. So we would love your feedback.
Mitch:We have a link. Like I said, bulb.digital/feedback. We'd love to know what you think about this episode. And, yeah, I appreciate you guys sitting down to chat today. Another good one.
Mitch:Thank you. Cool. Bye, everybody. See you. Hey.
Mitch:Thanks for tuning in to make others successful. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you. There's a couple ways you can do that. One, we'd love for you to rate our show on your favorite podcasting app. And then if you have feedback or topic ideas or suggestions for future episodes, head over to bulb.digital/feedback and let us know.
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