Orchestry Announces New  Recommendations Feature

A new powerful layer in the Orchestry experience, the Recommendations engine will provide immediate insights into the health of your M365 environment with a particular focus on management, governance, adoption, and security.  

Like an intelligent copilot, the engine will help to focus your efforts, only highlighting relevant recommended actions and categorizing them based on urgency and impact on your organization.

With tailored insights and even strategic rationale available for every unique recommendation, choose how to proceed from an informed perspective. If desired, follow step-by-step instructions to remediate issues or implement best practices. As a brand-new feature being introduced to the Orchestry Platform, Recommendations will be available soon to all existing customers!

What Problem are we Solving? 

Working with IT professionals for over a decade highlighted the challenges faced with both obtaining the data required to manage M365, as well as adequate tooling to effectively take action on this information. Without an elegant way to access a holistic view of this information, administrators were forced to cobble together PowerShell reports and hop from one admin centre to another – all in an attempt to answer simple questions like “Is my environment protected?” Even if you know the answer is ‘no,’ how do you resolve it?  

Rather than the alternative of fumbling in the dark, we decided to build a beautiful yet powerful, interface that would illuminate this scattered yet critical information and help IT Administrators prioritize their efforts where it could have the most impact. 

Figure 1.  Microsoft Purview Home and Guest Inactivity Script (via o365reports.com)

Introducing Orchestry Recommendations

Launching soon as an integral part of the Orchestry platform, and the first module in the new AI-driven Signals experience, the Recommendations engine is designed to become the nexus for suggested actions and recommendations for your Microsoft 365 environment. 

As an IT professional, begin your day viewing Orchestry’s latest recommendations – always reflecting the most recent activity and data in your tenant – and quickly get an overview of the areas that require your attention. These dynamic recommendations will provide clear direction on how to prioritize your valuable time and guide you through taking actions.  

Rather than spending hours of gruelling data analysis, let the machine learning of Orchestry’s Recommendations curate your experience and support you as if a team of Microsoft 365 experts were truly by your side. This will save you time, reduce costs and mitigate risk – and your users will thank you for it!

Figure 2. Orchestry Recommendations - your copilot to M365 Management 

Your co-pilot in managing M365, view recommendations tailored to your environment. 

Not every environment has the same challenges nor the same goals. Receiving a list of universal recommendations defined by generic and static rules only adds to the information overload. Cut through the noise thanks to adaptive triggers, leveraging both practical expertise and the benefit of artificial intelligence, and get an experience that is tailored to you and your unique environment.  

With Orchestry’s powerful data-collection and trend-monitoring capabilities, it is uniquely positioned to comb your vast Microsoft 365 dataset to create a fabric of information overlaid with insights that are genuinely useful and actionable. 

This is a new experience that is built both for the small enterprise, without dedicated administrative resources, but also with the depth to support the largest enterprises equipped with teams of administrators – just like the rest of Orchestry. 

Figure 3. Recommendations tailored to your unique environment 

As the Signals framework expands, look for new and meaningful ways for Recommendations to be further tailored and targeted directly to your environment based on your current priorities and needs. 

Backed by rationale and explanation. 

Understanding the depths of Microsoft 365, including Security, Purview, Entra, Teams, SharePoint and others, is outside the realm of possibility for most administrators and organizations. Some are fortunate to have access to outside expertise and consultants to help guide the prioritization, decision-making, and execution of recommended actions in Microsoft 365. But even with expert help, all organizations are constrained in one way or another, whether it be budget, people, time, or information.  

We believe any tenant-level recommendation important enough to merit your attention also deserves its own detailed rationale and justification – not to mention easy access to curated resources. Only with this distilled wisdom at your fingertips can an informed decision be made. 

Figure 4. Every recommendation includes a detailed rationale and justification

Step-by-step guidance on resolution.

Orchestry won’t let you down in the all-important final step of the process: taking action. A complete, end-to-end experience for reviewing and resolving recommendations requires a process that facilitates easy and effective action. Let Orchestry’s team of experts guide you through each step of the process and check off that security risk or storage concern without breaking a sweat. 

Figure 5. Step-by-step guidance on resolving your recommendations 

 As the Recommendation engine evolves, look for 1-click resolutions guided by the power of intuitive Orchestry automation. 

Why Should I Care (i.e., the cost of not doing anything) 

In a rapidly evolving cloud environment, the cost of analysis paralysis is enormous. Anything less than full-time hyper-vigilance can quickly lead to sprawl, skyrocketing storage requirements, security breaches, data loss, expensive redundant licensing, poor adoption and frustrated users.  

The cost of doing nothing is simply too high.

Let Orchestry guide you by prioritizing the areas that need attention and streamlining the necessary actions to restore best practices. 

Getting ready for Microsoft Copilot 

Microsoft Copilot is poised to unlock amazing new potential in the way organizations access and utilize content in their Microsoft 365 environment. Created to reduce the burden of mundane tasks, to inspire new heights of creativity, and to help provide focus on the activities that will drive your business forward. But are you ready?

Many organizations are still grappling with the consequences of the rapid rollout of key workloads like Microsoft Teams during the pandemic. As a technology with tendrils in every crevice of your environment, your first step in investigating Copilot is in environment readiness.  

Tackling sprawl is the first critical step to becoming Copilot ready. Why? Outdated or unused sites can clutter search results and submerge your quality data under a mountain of detritus. The result is a Microsoft Copilot impaired by poor information.  

The second major consideration is security hardening, which requires nothing short of a comprehensive security audit across your tenant. Because Copilot’s data sources respect, any improperly secured data (accidentally or otherwise) is primed to surface to the wrong audience and potentially cause significant problems for an organization.  

The Bottom line is that Copilot is exciting, but you must get your Microsoft 365 house in order before you launch to mitigate the risks of overexposure. Launching with recommendations centred around your tenant’s security, architecture, and sprawl – Orchestry will diagnose your issues and provide you with a path to resolving many of the same challenges that must be overcome for Copilot. 

Conclusion 

With the oversight required for Microsoft 365 only growing, administrators need real help to keep pace with change, support their user base and safeguard their environment against threats. Like an intelligent assistant, Orchestry’s Recommendation engine will collate disparate data sources into a cohesive tapestry and surface actionable insights tailored to your own environment. Backed by a team of Microsoft 365 experts, follow our step-by-step guidance to correct issues and return your environment to health. At last, that elusive single pane of glass!

Orchestry Recommendations deliver consulting-grade insights, tailored to your environment via AI and machine learning. Most importantly, this complex functionality is packaged in a beautiful and intuitive experience – exactly what you have come to expect from Orchestry. 

About Orchestry

Orchestry simplifies work in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint Online with its comprehensive enablement, adoption, and standardization platform. Developed by SharePoint MVPs and Microsoft 365 experts, Orchestry helps organizations decide "what to use when" in Microsoft 365, increasing technology adoption, empowering governance, and simplifying provisioning.