Alongside increased usage of SharePoint Online and OneDrive comes unexpected storage costs if left unchecked. Additional SharePoint Online storage is charged at a premium, and this can result in a significant financial burden to an organization that is not expecting these add-on costs. With some Microsoft 365 licenses already seeing a reduction in SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Exchange Online storage limits, it is important to understand your usage and support a governance policy to avoid extra charges or a negative impact on productivity. EMS 8.0 addresses this challenge by introducing the Microsoft 365 Storage Report. This feature provides a comprehensive overview of your organization's storage usage, broken down by each workload, giving you the visibility needed to manage and optimize storage costs effectively.
In a tough economy where organizations are expected to achieve more with less, strong technology adoption programs are essential for maximizing employee engagement and productivity and getting the most out of your investments. Recently, we have seen many organizations reviewing their technology investments under a microscope to see if there are duplicative tools and add-ons that can be retired as a cost-saving measure. Our new True Adoption Center in EMS 8.0 is designed to help organizations measure and enhance their use of Microsoft 365 workloads and features by supplying the data necessary for successful training initiatives. The 8.0 True Adoption Center automatically calculates an organization’s score upon sign-up and allows for the creation of customized personas that reflect specific roles or departments. It also enables you to choose the workload-specific actions and engagement metrics that are uniquely valuable to your organization. This provides a precise measure of adoption across various criteria and helps identify both champions and areas for improvement and greater ROI.
The True Adoption Center is valuable for initial inquiries into Microsoft 365 adoption, future licensing planning and procurement, and ongoing productivity assessments and preparations for Microsoft Copilot. By leveraging these insights, organizations can ensure they are making the most of their technology investments, taking advantage of new features, driving productivity, and reducing costs.
With EMS 8.0, we have re-engineered our web front end and SQL backend architecture, resulting in significant performance improvements and reduced maintenance complexity. Many customers have maintained and relied on the built-in database as part of the EMS 7.x architecture. With EMS 8.0, we have migrated to the SQL database, eliminating the need for the built-in database. This change not only enhances the performance of the ENow web server but also simplifies the maintenance routine for the SQL database. In future releases, this new architecture will support additional web servers to meet load balancing and high availability requirements, allowing customers to scale up seamlessly.
The brand-new user interface in EMS 8.0 is designed to be attractive, modern, and intuitive for all team members. We have preserved familiar concepts related to the monitoring dashboard and report viewing while improving the layout to make it easier to locate, access, and share information. This ensures that both existing and new users can quickly adapt to the new system and leverage its capabilities to the fullest.
Figure 2: The new ENow Reporting User Interface in 8.0.
ENow 8.0 represents a significant step forward in helping organizations navigate the complexities of IT management, especially in a challenging economic climate. By embracing this new release, you can improve efficiency, gain greater control over costs, and maximize the return on your technology investments.
Explore the new features of EMS 8.0 and discover how it can transform your organization’s approach to IT management.
The key features of this release include: