Many MSPs are moving their clients to cloud solutions and services like Office 365. This takes the burden of managing and maintaining hardware at each client and places it back on companies like Microsoft. One of the benefits to moving your clients over is the high reliability of the services. Your clients would not be dependent on their local environment and be subject to outages caused by power, hardware or network failures. A downside to choosing this option, however, is that when the service is down, you'll hear about it from every client you have.
Instead of managing and maintaining the uptime for services like email, MSPs are now maintaining security, usage and user experiences. Many IT departments and Managed Service Providers turn to applications like GSX's Office 365 management tools to keep control of Office 365. GSX currently provides services such as usage reports, security audits, insights into business communications, and user and license administration.
Office 365: Digital Experience Monitoring?
Next week at the Microsoft Ignite 2017 conference, GSX Solutions will demonstrate its latest offering, called Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Analysis for Office 365 and cloud/hybrid environments. The company says GSX’s DEM reporting service consists of Robot Users in enterprise-critical locations to capture and analyze the real performance of services delivered to end users.
The Robot Users mimic end-user actions on Office 365 services like creating meetings, sending emails, looking up free / busy times, downloading or uploading documents on SharePoint or OneDrive, and even using instant messaging on Skype for Business. GSX then deploys several Business Analytic dashboards that transform the data into actionable items. IT operations can then improve end-user satisfaction while decreasing their total cost of ownership (TCO) of Office 365.
The company claims that early adopters of the GSX DEM Reporting services are showing tremendous success. Improvements in understanding the validity of user complaints have resulted in the ability to prevent and resolve up to 60 percent of performance support tickets. These early results are helping companies justify the expense of the product to IT management, the company claims.
The big question: Can MSPs plug into GSX's platform to track and improve Office 365 end-customer experiences? We'll be watching for updates.
