Top Considerations for Using Microsoft 365 for Collaboration
By Ryan Charnock, Centric Consulting Senior Consultant, Modern Workplace
Learn the four critical factors to consider when using Microsoft 365 as your primary collaboration technology.
The personal consumption of digital content is the silent driver for workplace innovation. From sharing humorous short videos with friends to scrolling Instagram while sitting in a waiting room, digital content, and collaboration have taken root in every generation, culture, and social group. This glacier of pressure is affecting employees’ expectations of collaboration and engagement, so it is no surprise that employees now want the technology in their work lives to match what they enjoy in their personal lives.
Microsoft 365 is rising to the occasion to provide innovative business solutions to keep pace with our personal digital lives. In our personal lives, the benefit is being connected to friends, family, and entertainment. But what is the benefit of such innovative solutions in the workplace?
Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Is all this collaboration just a “faster horse”? Are users really getting what they want or need?
Let’s consider four common factors essential to getting the most from your Microsoft collaboration technology.
Reduced Administrative Toil
Reducing administrative toil — simply taking less time to do the same task — has been a significant focus of technological advancements. Think back to when internal corporate communications consisted of handwritten or printed memos that were copied and placed in a wire bin labeled “inbox” on someone’s desk. Email and, later, instant messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams, improved that workflow by creating a digital “inbox.”
The big takeaway is the reduction of administrative toil. Today, no one prints documents or uses carts to haul copies around the office, going up and down elevators to distribute them to different floors. Instead, we write our message, select the recipients, click a button, and send it without the administrative toil of paper memos.
Microsoft also reduces administrative toil with its subscription- and cloud-based Microsoft 365. Teams can access documents and other files from any device with an internet connection. People can collaborate in either synchronous or asynchronous environments.
However, another significant improvement is that updating Office software is now automated. Once upon a time, IT manually installed Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook on devices. Updates to new releases were troublesome and time-consuming to install and configure.
For example, I once had 15 laptops I used for Office training. Each time I had a class, I had to ensure that the versions installed on my laptops matched those in the client’s setup. When they didn’t, I had to uninstall the mismatched software and install the appropriate versions manually. This is when we used a CD to install software in an assembly line fashion. With the release of the subscription-based Office 365, the responsibility of staying up to date flipped from the purchaser to the provider, which now provides automated updates and maintenance.
This switch saved us time, money, and administrative toil.
Baseline Security and Compliance
Collaboration technology must be compliant, secure, and installed on devices that we can trust. With on-premises data centers and services, we could hide our devices behind firewalls and build distance between us and the bad guys. Now, our devices are out in the public, intermingling like spies in a foreign war. This creates new challenges that we never faced before. Our collaboration solution must secure our content at every endpoint, whether data is in storage, in transit, or use.
With Microsoft 365, multifactor authentication makes identities more secure than ever. Microsoft Purview allows us to track, encrypt, and prevent data from leaving a corporate joined device. Meanwhile, Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention gives us automatic insights into where sensitive data is stored and how it is used.
These compliance and security corporate requirements are essential to collaboration. Without security defined at the baseline, these tools would not be usable. Microsoft 365 has an army of companion security and compliance tools like Purview that track and mark content while keeping it within policy guidelines.
We Still Need People
Even with excellent collaboration technology that is quick to use, secure, and compliant, true collaboration relies on people who are involved, connected, and trust each other and their devices.
Technology is like a restaurant where friends get together to eat and plan their next adventure. The restaurant must be secure, compliant (good quality food), and easy to get to. To prepare, the people still need to come together in one trusted, mutually agreed upon, easy-to-access place for their meal.
Collaboration requires trust, and trust involves connection between people and your team. If collaboration is the goal, reducing administrative toil in a secure, compliant way is the first step. The next step is for people to engage within this platform.
The challenge is that there are three categories of users and how they relate to new technology:
- First are the early adopters who don’t need much help getting excited about change or new tools. These gadget people get the latest technology because it’s cool. Their entire house is automated with Alexa, and their holiday lights are synchronized to a hip-hop song that drivers can enjoy from their cars.
- Second is what I call the “average” group. They need permission from the organization and must be gently shown how to use the new technology to improve their mission. These people look at most ideas and think, “Convince me. I am not opposed, but you need to sell me on the merits so I can adjust if I see the benefits.”
- Finally, there are resistors. This group is generally not motivated by obstinance but by fear. They worry the new tools will not live up to their claims or will require more time and work than the tools promise. These folks should be identified and leaders should listen to concerns. The resistors are intelligent and insightful people who often bring up uncommon use cases that, if not addressed, could cause problems in a rollout.
Understanding your team members and how they relate to and consume new ideas and technology must be central to every technology conversation. Otherwise, only the excited will use the new collaboration tool, and mass adoption will never happen.
Generative AI is Already Here
With the recent release of Microsoft Copilot, our collaboration tools now go beyond reducing administrative toil, compliance, security, and communication. With the help of generative AI, they can now help create content based on your organization’s data and tone.
Copilot introduces a new chapter, and no one can yet fully imagine its impact. At the time of writing, Copilot is in limited release, and we have yet to see it work outside of conference demos. Most experts agree that it is here, and it is already affecting how collaboration will happen. It may even be helping me write this article!
Wrapping Up
Collaboration tools like Microsoft 365 reduce daily administrative toil, giving us time back. However, these tools must meet the baseline compliance and security requirements — or they’ll be useless.
No matter what, collaboration requires people to take the initiative to connect and work together. Microsoft Copilot has now entered stage left and is adding a new collaborative voice that has learned from our historical organization’s tone and past content.
Microsoft 365 has come a long way in helping to advance our organization’s goals with collaboration. What still interests me after all these years is how organizations use these tools to accomplish their goals.
