Use technology for its purpose: when to use what in Microsoft 365
Sometimes we see organizations rush into their Microsoft 365 deployment and not leverage the various technologies appropriately. This happens partly because Microsoft 365 apps have similar functionality and it’s confusing to know what tool to use for what purpose. For example, SharePoint and OneDrive both offer document management, but SharePoint is more scalable.
The various products are designed for a specific purpose and using them for their intended purpose will maximize value and ROI. So, here's a short explainer of what apps are suited for different types of work.
Apps for personal productivity
Work first starts with you. You likely have personal files, meeting notes, task list(s), e-mail and a calendar to manage. Here’s our recommendation of the Microsoft 365 apps to enable right away when you roll-out the platform:
Outlook
We don’t need to describe this one much except to note that Outlook is a daily starting point for most people as it manages email, calendar and perhaps tasks.
OneDrive for Business
OneDrive is for personal content and files. It replaces personal drives whether those are local or on a network share. The guidance we give is that OneDrive is for files that you are not ready to share, draft files, or worst-case for files that you’re sharing with one or two others for early feedback.
If OneDrive is not provided to users, people will store content on their desktop, Dropbox, personal drives. At the very least, if people use OneDrive, important content is audited, discoverable, backed up etc.
To Do
Microsoft shared a vision during Ignite 2020 to create a coherent tasks experience across Microsoft 365, whether those tasks are in email, Planner, documents, Teams or other places. This vision includes the To Do app for tracking personal tasks:
To Do brings together tasks you add for yourself, suggestions from Planner, Outlook and documents. It’s good for people who manage task lists for their work outside of the regular team tasks.
OneNote
A colleague shared with me that they used to scatter Notepad files everywhere to take miscellaneous notes, but now they keep OneNote running in the background for that purpose. Here’s an example page she shared with me to show how she tracks ideas for posts:
The downside is that it can get messy over time without effort to organize the notes. However, it’s better to have that mess contained to a searchable app rather than files scattered on the desktop. There are ‘search’ and ‘recent notes’ options on the left to get around the mess.
Team productivity and collaboration
SharePoint
SharePoint has two basic purposes: communicating to the organization with Employee Portals and sharing team files with Collaboration Portals.
Examples of a SharePoint Online Employee Portal and Collaboration Portal
Collaboration portals provide enterprise document management capabilities including permissions, metadata to organize content, rich views, and more. It’s meant for large-scale, longer lived content.
Employee portals are useful to share news, events, people info and as a platform for employee self-service.
We still build and design collaboration and employee portals in SharePoint, and in some cases tightly integrated into Teams.
Teams
Teams is more than a Skype replacement. It's the digital home for teamwork, communications and chatting with people. It provides:
Team based collaboration
Persistent chat
Meetings
Video and phone calls
Document Management (back-end is SharePoint)
Note: to get the most value from the platform, use Teams AND SharePoint…
It’s not either-or. Teams is becoming the starting point for all collaboration and the interface for all collaboration, but SharePoint is still the back-end for Document Management. It has an interface into other parts of Microsoft 365 including integrations for Power BI, Lists, Planner tasks and more. It also connects to 3rd party systems or tools, like Trello, Github, etc.
Planner
Planner is useful for project management and tracking tasks across a team. If you use Kanban style boards or manage projects using lean techniques, this is a useful one to have in your toolkit. Tasks can be grouped into categories or status, assigned to different people and reminders sent when tasks are close to their due date or overdue.
When your team are added as members to the group, they all have access to the board which makes it handy to have open and update during status meetings, etc.
Yammer
Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise social tool — think Facebook for the enterprise.
It keeps valuable tacit information from conversations and tends to have longer-lived content than Teams. Other key differences between Yammer and Teams:
· Teams is good for content that is temporary, secured and locked down to smaller sets of people
· Teams tends to be easier to use for higher volume of messages
· Yammer is typically not used for immediate info or real-time collaboration
Summary
That’s our quick summary on the main apps for Microsoft 365 that you should enable right away. We recommend enabling this suite of tools to maximize personal productivity and team collaboration.
Let us know if you have questions about what apps to use in Microsoft 365 and how best to roll out the platform to your organization, including how to govern it.
