The drawbacks of disabling Microsoft Office 365 services and apps
The Microsoft 365 suite of products such as Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, are a powerful package of tools. When implemented correctly, they can increase productivity, improve collaboration, and create powerful business solutions.
Often, organizations want to roll-out each one of these products individually rather than as a full package. While this may seem like a great idea in theory, in practice there are several pitfalls. While each product may seem like an individual application that can run independently of the others, many of these products rely on each other to function to their full capabilities. They are interconnected and highly dependent on one another. Disabling one of the products within the suite may have unexpected consequences on another product and cause limited functionality or a poor end user experience.
What happens when you disable services?
Given the recent pandemic, we’ve seen a need and desire to roll-out Microsoft Teams, but often clients aren’t ready to roll-out OneDrive for Business (OneDrive), Exchange Online, or SharePoint, not realizing that Microsoft Teams relies on these 3 products to store content behind the scenes. I wrote a previous blog on recovering content in Microsoft Teams where I detailed what is happening behind the scenes from a storage perspective with files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive and conversations stored in Exchange Online.
Diagram of Teams dependencies, courtesy of Microsoft
What happens in Teams
If the core services of OneDrive, Exchange Online, or SharePoint are not enabled with Teams, expect that not all functionalities will work as expected. In the end, you will spend time disabling things (such as sharing files in Teams) and likely supporting users when functions don’t work as expected.
In the end, you will spend time disabling things (such as sharing files in Teams) and likely supporting users when functions don’t work as expected.
What happens in Forms
Microsoft Forms is another example of a product that has great functionality, but also relies on SharePoint or OneDrive when you start allowing attachments in Forms. These other products are the storage areas for the data at rest.
What happens in Power Automate
Power Automate is a third example, where without Exchange Online, your email capabilities are severely limited, and while there is a generic Mail connector, it doesn’t have the same rich functionality that the Exchange Connector has. All emails end up coming from an external Microsoft email rather than a dedicated user’s email, which is not intuitive for people.
What we recommend: start with a plan!
This is why it is even more important to roadmap your rollout of the Microsoft 365 suite. While we do prefer turning everything on and then controlling governance and functionality of all the products, there is a logical order to rolling out the products based on which one's support the others. The majority of the suite really rely on these three core products: Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint as the major backends. Even SharePoint itself relies on OneDrive to perform certain functionality like syncing of libraries.
If you do not plan to turn on all services at once, which would be the recommended approach given how integrated these products are to each other, then there is a logical order for rolling out the products. Start with Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and then SharePoint. Since these three products provide most of the backend services the other products rely on for certain functionality, these are the primary starting points. Exchange Online and OneDrive can be rolled out with little impact on end-users and are the suggested first steps to your Cloud Migration into Microsoft 365.
If you do not plan to turn on all services at once, which would be the recommended approach given how integrated these products are to each other, then there is a logical order for rolling out the products. Start with Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and then SharePoint.
SharePoint should involve a more strategic roll-out including pilot groups and a phased approach with involvement from the users. During the SharePoint roll-out consider enabling other products like Microsoft Teams, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps, Microsoft Forms and Planner to extend the platform and enable richer and more productive experiences for your users.
Once you have those 3 core products implemented, then you can leverage the full capabilities of the other products in most scenarios. This will allow you to start enabling the other services and not having users get errors or wonder why certain functionality just doesn’t work. In turn that will save your IT or Help Desk departments time and effort from explaining to users about the limited functionality from the disabled supporting products.
Data residency consideration
One last note: some products may not meet your data residency requirements and can be disabled. Generally, the core products will reside locally and be compliant. However, for example in Canada, a few of the products store data at rest in the United States. For government organizations or municipalities this may not be compliant, so things like Microsoft Forms or Whiteboard need to be disabled. Luckily, these products aren’t dependencies for other applications, although they do help provide richer experiences to the users.
In summary: use an enable-first mindset
When planning to enable Microsoft 365, we recommend taking an ‘enable-first’ mindset. This means enabling as many services as possible out of the gate, instead of disabling features. In the short-term, it may mean more support for end-users and migration at the start, but it saves you from issues and unexpected surprises in the long-run.
A quick conversation with an outside expert can help clarify Microsoft 365 dependencies for your organization. If you need help, please reach out for advice or guidance!
