What do you like best about Orchestry?
If you are still managing the lifecycle of your existing M365 Teams and Groups using only out of the box methods, or provisioning customized Teams and Groups the same way, you're spending too much time and you're probably doing it ineffectively.
Even if you've mastered the art of using PnP Powershell to do the above things, Orchestry will save you significant time and hassle on a day to day basis.
The tool is simple to install, simple to use - for both Admins and site (Orchestry calls them 'Workspaces') requestors. The tool is affordable for medium- to large-scale enterprises.
On the site and guest user lifecycle governance front, Orchestry's feature set compares well with offerings from 'the usual suspects' - AvePoint, Dell (Metalogix) and others. Orchestry doesn't do everything those products do, but it does all the important stuff at a much lower cost.
In the custom site provisioning arena, Orchestry is a HUGE improvement over any of the Microsoft-provided approaches. Microsoft should just stop with trotting out new but incomplete and ineffective ways of provisioning customized sites and leave the job to Orchestry.
Orchestry is even a significant improvement over what you can accomplish using PnP Powershell and Azure Automation, even if you're willing to invest LARGE amounts of time in the process.
If you've already invested large amounts of time writing PnP scripts to automate customized site provisioning, then subscribing to Orchestry is still a good idea. You'll be able to convert your scripts to running under a Webhook that Orchestry will invoke when it's done with initial provisioning.
Since neither Orchestry nor any general-purpose tool can possibly do everything you might need to do with respect to pre- or post-provisioning automation, that's a good thing.
If you've been trying to work with Microsoft's methods for provisioning customized sites and thinking "there must be a better way to do this", you're right. There is, and it's called Orchestry.
G2 wants me to talk about some specific topics, so here goes:
1. Ease of Implementation - Orchestry itself installs in minutes. Configuring customized sites and run-time policies takes a bit more time, but it's simple. There's no coding involved, anywhere, in that process (though a 'user exit' function to insert custom code at key points in the process would be a good enhancement).
2. Customer Support - The folks who handle tickets for Orchestry are very knowledgeable and experienced. They even speak the Queen's English, and they respond quickly. You won't need to call on support very often, but when you do, you'll get it and you'll enjoy the process.
3. Frequency of Use - I'm not sure what G2 means by this, but I usually tell a prospective client who doesn't have Orchestry already to get it as a pre-requisite to my agreeing to help them implement their Intranet/Extranet. Once installed, Orchestry will be used on a daily basis by both M365 admins (for governance) and by authorized end-users (to provision new sites). If you've been dealing with site sprawl by forcing your users to live within the confines of a limited number of sites, then you're probably doing it wrong. When you have a tool that's as productive as Orchestry, there are no real barriers to 'doing your information architecture right', which has big benefits to the efficiency and effectiveness of your collaboration efforts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Orchestry?
The product has come a long way since it was first introduced. Great progress has been made in terms of feature/function, but there is still room for some improvements.
Orchestry recognizes this, and their roadmap is robust. For example, Orchestry recently gained the ability to provision sites whose lists and document libraries incorporate content types that are subscribed from the Content Type Hub.
Since Microsoft themselves only recently made the SharePoint Online Content Type Hub actually usable, I would say that Orchestry is tracking Microsoft's roadmap appropriately.
There are a few other areas that could be enhanced. For example, it is a common practice to populate the property bag of new SharePoint sites with attributes whose values can be used to inform 'dynamic directories' of sites to present to users. Since Orchestry provides a great mechanism for capturing such site-specific metadata at workspace request time, it's natural to want to have the provisioning process take the site request metadata and populate property bag attributes with that data once the site has been provisioned.
Other ideas like that abound. Orchestry is open to such conversations and responsive to good ideas from customers.
They can't do everything all at once, however, which is why the product provides a post-provisioning call-back mechanism that customers can use to automate the post-provisioning process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
