Office 365 is more than just SharePoint
If you have Office 365, then you have a world of collaboration and digital workplace enablement at your fingertips. Many organizations are using O365 only for SharePoint, email, and Skype, but there is so much more available! Join me at SPTechCon Boston to learn more!
“Office 365 is a cloud-based subscription service that brings together the best tools for the way people work today. By combining best-in-class apps with powerful cloud services, Office 365 lets anyone create and collaborate anywhere on any device.” ~Microsoft.
Microsoft describes Office 365 (O365) as a collaborate anywhere, on any device, solution. O365 is all about collaboration — and it’s true. The primary collaboration services in O365 are email and SharePoint, but there’s more than that. Many of the capabilities in O365 help supplement existing collaborative activities, introduce new ways of being connected and removing the friction that hinders employee creativity and collaboration.
Office 365 is no small toolset
There is so much here and it can be daunting. We know what we know in O365: email, SharePoint, and Skype. Before we dismiss the rest of the stack, it’s important to understand what the rest does as well from a business capability point of view. Don’t narrow in on a single service, like Microsoft Flow, and say “No”. Instead, O365 has to be looked at in its entirety, as the holistic capabilities the entire stack has to offer. Did you know SharePoint workflows are best done in Microsoft Flow? Can’t say no to that service now, can we?
Many of these services work best when working with other services, they all play really well together, unlike my children.
Learn it, understand it, then decide
As we look at the entire stack of Office 365, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed. Supporting these services as an enterprise can get complex quickly, as we need to consider:
- Training for support staff and IT admins
- Change management activities
- Adoption and engagement activities
- Governance policies
- Provisioning requests
- Software deployment and upgrades
- Communications strategy
- Licensing considerations
- …And more
As with anything, make a strategy on how you will approach level setting you and your teams’ understanding of what O365 is. You don’t have to adopt it all at once, be purposeful in what you roll out. Also, engage your best and brightest, let your people check it out and provide their feedback, allow them to discover the benefits organically. Deliver the services in a manner that will increase the probability of user adoption. Do not force it on them. Obviously, you’ll need to know your people to maximize success.
Are you coming to SPTechCon Boston, August 25–28, 2019?
Join me in my session on Wednesday where we’ll dive deeper on all of this. Whether your brand new and kicking the tires or O365 is an old hat for you, I can guarantee you’ll find this session packed with new information and help you refresh your expectations on O365!
Want to learn more?
We at Slalom have partnered with many organizations in finding these answers, educating on the capabilities, discovering how they fit in their workforce, and partnering with them in identifying the best capabilities for their people. We have O365 architects and user adoption specialists who can supplement your teams to improve understanding of Office 365 as well as creating a strong strategy for rollout and user adoption. Don’t shy away from it, engage O365 and reap the benefits! Reach out to me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Medium to connect!
