Microsoft Modern Workplace

Distributed work is here to stay, and Toronto organizations now face the challenge of finding a scalable way to maintain a well-managed and secure digital workplace. In this new world of work, modernizing workflows and the employee experience is more critical than ever. That’s where Microsoft’s Modern Workplace comes in. Through Microsoft’s Modern Workplace, Microsoft has delivered probably the most secure, safest, scalable, and most cohesive suite of services designed specifically for employees to work together from any location.

With Microsoft Modern Workplace solutions, your company can improve employee productivity and satisfaction and create more seamless communication and collaboration across locations and platforms while maintaining the security and integrity of your systems and data. It’s scalable, secure, compliant with industry standards, but most importantly, it integrates seamlessly into an ever-changing digital ecosystem to provide innovative solutions on what’s next in terms of workplace management.

What’s the Microsoft Modern Workplace?

Microsoft’s “modern workplace” concept is a new way of working that uses the latest cloud-based Microsoft 365 tools and services to create a more integrated, agile system that can evolve as a company grows. Microsoft’s Modern Workplace is designed to drive company-wide business transformation by utilizing the latest Microsoft technology to power and streamline business operations and empower employees to do their best work around the clock.

It meets the physical and technological needs of both your business and its employees by eliminating problems and frustrations that arise when co-workers are attempting to work together from different locations, such as lack of cross-platform services, poor communication, data in silos, clunky processes, dated service offerings, no self-service for basic IT needs, a beleaguered IT department, and shadow IT. When fully adopted, the modern workplace streamlines business processes, enhances communication, and enables employees to connect, collaborate, and create from anywhere.

What Does the Microsoft Modern Workplace Include?

The Microsoft Modern Workplace contains various productivity and collaboration tools designed to support modern ways of working, help facilitate digital transformation, and, most importantly, keep your business secure. These features include:

One Drive
Microsoft Teams
SharePoint
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Business Voice
Azure Active Directory
Microsoft Power Automate
Enterprise Mobility + security
Windows 10 Virtual Desktop
Microsoft Business Voice
Power BI
Modern endpoint management (Intune)

Why Does My Organization Need Microsoft Modern Workplace Solutions?

Microsoft Modern Workplace applications improve employee productivity and satisfaction and create more seamless communication across the business while promoting collaboration and maintaining the security and integrity of systems and data.

1. Microsoft’s Modern Workplace Promotes More Effective Collaboration

Teamwork is at the heart of every successful business – which is why Microsoft Office 365 has ramped up collaborative tools such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams for Education, Office 365, and SharePoint, which make it easier for co-workers to have conversations in real-time, share information, files and notes all in one place.

As Microsoft’s “hub for teamwork,” Teams integrate with Microsoft 365 apps and bring together chat, calls, meetings, file sharing, and third-party tools in one centralized location. With Teams, your employees can communicate with each other, exchange information and data, coordinate their appointments, work together on documents, and much more. Microsoft Teams is constantly evolving and adding new features for greater agility, productivity, and collaboration. Teams contain secure meetings, shareable calendars, streamlined file sharing, more effective video meetings, offline autosend, and built-in cloud storage.

2. Microsoft’s Modern Workplace Automates Time-Consuming Tasks

Today’s businesses require digital solutions that are fast, efficient, and easy to use. Microsoft aims to achieve this by including Power Automate as part of its Modern Workplace. Microsoft Modern Workplace enables you to implement both Digital and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) across the organization. Power Automate helps businesses tackle everyday activities more efficiently, and it provides employees with a tremendous user experience.

With Microsoft Power Automate, you can automate time-consuming tasks, which helps you save time, organize your day better, and helps turn your employees into much more efficient workers who can work smarter and not harder to improve the business’s overall performance. You can quickly boost productivity by automating everyday tasks, giving employees more time to focus on innovation than administrative tasks.

Power Automate is accessible to everyone, coders and non-coders – it offers a rich set of low-code solutions that creates automated end-to-end processes and resolves common problems millions of employees struggle with on a day-to-day basis. You can accelerate your business with intelligent apps, create low-code apps within a couple of minutes, and turn ideas into valuable solutions. Common uses of Power Automate include triggering notifications, collecting data, approving payrolls, organizing meetings, automating emails, and scheduling content on blogs and social media.

Benefits of automating business processes with Microsoft Power Automate Include:

Improved business processes and quantifiable business outcomes
Data-driven decisions
Increased employee satisfaction and decreased errors
Additional value realization from related Microsoft solutions
Improve security by integrating workflows with Azure Active Directory and other Microsoft security solutions

3. Microsoft’s Modern Workplace Keeps Your Information Secure

As the modern workforce becomes more distributed, businesses need modern security solutions to adapt to flexible work environments without compromising sensitive data. The Microsoft Modern Workplace offers enhanced security tools along three fronts: threat protection, data protection, and device management. Microsoft’s array of security technologies gives businesses the insights to proactively defend against advanced threats, such as malware, phishing, and zero-day attacks, and ensure that only authorized users can access your environment.

The latest cybersecurity tools help businesses create secure environments using a tightly integrated set of security technologies, including Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Threat Intelligence, Azure Security Center, and Azure Advanced Threat Protection.

Microsoft’s security tools provide:

Email protection against harmful documents or links
Multi-factor authentication for more secure sign-in
Windows Defender anti-virus software
Data loss prevention to prevent sensitive information from being shared accidentally
Message encryption to ensure only intended recipients can read emails and that they can’t be forwarded to others
Manage access to company information on personal devices, and restrict how those files are moved
Fully manage company devices to encrypt or wipe data remotely in case of loss or theft

While Microsoft’s Modern Workplace offers a formidable security package, it isn’t foolproof and can be vulnerable to a breach. We recommend partnering with cybersecurity experts like Tektonic to provide additional security measures. Our cybersecurity services provide an extra layer of security to Microsoft’s Modern Workplace and cover your in-house IT infrastructure and remote devices. Using advanced tools, we eliminate threats by identifying potential vulnerabilities across your entire network and receive real-time alerts for potential threats. Our IT consultants can also educate your staff on how to recognize and prevent security threats.

Tektonic is Your Microsoft Modern Workplace IT Partner in Toronto

Microsoft’s Modern Workplace solutions bring your organization one step closer to achieving your digital transformation goals with a suite of services that can boost collaboration and productivity and provide the endpoint-to-cloud security you need. The Microsoft modern workplace is built with the scalability and flexibility to deploy on-premisein the Microsoft Azure cloud or choose a hybrid strategy that suits your data security and compliance requirements.

At Tektonic, we provide Microsoft 365 design, implementation, adoption, and management services for both on-premise and cloud technologies for large and mid-size organizations in Toronto. We will design your IT strategy, migrate your data to the Microsoft cloud, optimize your Microsoft 365 services and ensure that your Microsoft 365 environment stays up and running so you and your people can focus on work that really matters. If you are interested in implementing Microsoft Modern Workplace for your business or would like some professional advice on where to start, contact us to schedule a consultation with our Microsoft-certified experts.