Microsoft 365 set up for how you really work

Hybrid work is the starting point

Sandy Springs has something most of the north metro lacks: three MARTA Red Line stations inside city limits, with a fourth at Perimeter Mall just over the Dunwoody line. Add GA-400, I-285 and plenty of staff who work from home part of the week, and a typical office team is rarely in one place. Some people check email on the train, some work from a kitchen table in Roswell, and partners take calls from client offices in Buckhead. Microsoft 365 is what holds that together, if it's set up with care.

What a careful setup includes

• Sign-in security. MFA for every user, conditional access rules that weigh location and device health, and older sign-in methods switched off.
• Email. Exchange Online with strong filtering, shared mailboxes for intake or billing and SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that make your domain much harder to fake. That matters to any firm whose clients act on emailed instructions.
• Files. SharePoint sites and Teams organized by client, matter, department or project, with permissions that follow your structure. OneDrive for personal working files. Sensitivity labels and external sharing rules, so a client folder isn't shared with the world by accident.
• Devices. Laptops and phones enrolled in Intune. New machines configure themselves when a user signs in, disk encryption is enforced, and a lost laptop left on a train can be locked and wiped.
• Phones and meetings. Teams for chat and meetings, and Teams Phone where it makes sense to retire an old phone system. A cloud phone system also makes the next office move simpler.
• Licenses. The right plan for each user. We often find firms paying for premium licenses nobody uses while missing the security features they need.

Cloud makes office moves easier

Leases in the Perimeter market turn over, and firms move between towers more often than they expect. Every server in your closet is something that has to be shut down, moved, cabled and brought back up over a weekend. When files, email and phones live in Microsoft 365, the new suite needs internet, a firewall, Wi-Fi and power. That's it. Staff can even keep working from home through move week, because nothing they need is sitting in a box. Several of the moves we plan start with the question of what can leave the server room before move day.

Moving off old servers

Many offices still run a server bought when the firm was smaller, holding shared drives, user logins and an application or two. We look at each workload separately. File shares usually move to SharePoint and Teams. User logins move to Microsoft Entra ID. Some line-of-business software, such as certain practice management, accounting or document management systems, may belong on a hosted server or the vendor's own cloud service. We talk to the vendors, plan the order, migrate after hours and keep a rollback ready until everyone is working normally.

Mergers, splits and new partners

Professional firms in Sandy Springs combine, spin off groups and bring on lateral hires with books of business. Each of those means moving mailboxes and files between Microsoft 365 tenants, merging domains or separating data cleanly. We plan those migrations so email keeps flowing, calendars and files arrive intact and the people who need access have it on the first day.

Management after setup

Microsoft 365 changes every month. We follow Microsoft's change notices, act on Secure Score suggestions and risky sign-in reports, set up and close accounts as people come and go, and trim or add licenses as the team changes. A new hire gets a laptop that's ready on the first morning. A departing employee loses access the same day, and their mailbox and files are kept for as long as you need.

Questions about microsoft 365 & cloud