If you have Microsoft Office 365 in your company, you have many exciting tools for the team with you – often without even knowing it, let alone knowing exactly what you can or should do with it.
Honestly, the last question is the most exciting: which tools will help my process?
First of all: if you think you want to use all the tools, you will probably find yourself in a jumble of information a year after this decision. You will need some professional help like a Microsoft Development firm to get the maximum results out of these online platforms.
What is there are tools of different “levels of maturity” that will help to replace e-mails as the main information channel and to establish knowledge management that is really capable of working in a team.
First of all, if you don’t have an Office 365 license for a business or school account, or will soon have one: use your time more wisely than by reading this post. Because without such an account you don’t have all these functions (except Sway). And Sway doesn’t matter much. We advise you to get help from a Microsoft Development firm for your own convenience.
If you don’t know what kind of account you actually have: In a file, click on the File tab, then on Office Account: it’s there. Log into your online account, e.g. via the Outlook Web App. Then click on the mini-tiles in the upper left corner. Medium blue in the picture above. After that, you will see the tiles of the apps as shown above.
Table of Contents
Teams
Microsoft Teams is perhaps the “flagship” of the whole fleet. A team has its own place that contains the standard Conversation, Files, and WIKI tabs. The entertainment page replaces Yammer here. Additional tabs – e.g. OneNote or Planner elements can easily be added. Messages can also be sent to the team from a normal e-mail account, they will receive an e-mail address in the company’s domain. Various “channels” can be opened within the team. Microsoft Teams is absolutely mobile-ready. There are apps for different devices.
Planners
Very cool task tool that can easily conjure up a really fancy Kanban board – for example. This includes task assignments, appointment overviews and a clear dashboard of upcoming tasks. What I haven’t found here yet is the reminder function at a specific time.
Delve
If your head is already spinning, Delve is recommended. With Delve you have the cockpit, the dashboard where everything comes together and becomes visible without you having to regularly check all the other different “entrances”. Documents located in OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint libraries are displayed according to the user’s search and work history. Delve is trainable. The plan is that Delve “knows” what the user will need and displays exactly that information and documents. How well this works in practice: I don’t know yet, that will probably become clear when more data and experience are available. I see some risk in the “filter bubble”.
Flow
Maps – as the name suggests – workflows and routines. Very adept for approval processes and all other “routine runs” where multiple people are involved at different stages of the process. A Microsoft Development firm has more experience and expertise than yourself trying to figure out how to maximize your benefits using online platform features.
Skype for Business
was previously called Lync and works closely with Outlook. This allows teams to quickly start a video conference, for example. The status is also useful. If this is maintained, colleagues can see whether a conversation partner is at their desk and possibly has time for a phone call. In some houses it is common to write a short message in the Skype chat window like this: “Are you free right now? I’d like to talk to you on the phone.” – before picking up the phone.
Yammer
“WhatsApp for business” – this means a chat program that brings the group messages known from private contexts into business. Don’t get too attached to it because it’s scheduled to be discontinued next summer. Replacements are the conversations in Microsoft Teams or the groups directly in Outlook 365.
SharePoint
This is a very very powerful tool. With this you can keep many things “under the same roof”. However, complexity has the price that users often find handling it cumbersome. The others – compared to small programs – can be operated largely intuitively.
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sway
Last but not least, a few words: No, it’s not a team tool, no, it’s not really suitable for business yet; If only because I don’t have a chance to produce CI-compliant layouts. Nevertheless: I can put together “maps” quickly and easily and use them to put together a small “online brochure” or a presentation.
My Assessment:
I underline this subjectively: after my first steps of exploration and testing with all these tools, my first thoughts were, “that’s complex”. It’s not really complicated anywhere. The tools are mostly self-explanatory. But what gets complicated and tricky is using these tools in teams and companies with a good design.
If everyone does “something” “somehow”, only a jungle of information emerges back here as well. This is already the case with “normal” file storage and it doesn’t get any better with all these tools – just different. Planning, conception and uniform procedures are also necessary here.
An advantage that should not be underestimated when hiring service of a Microsoft Development firm is the environments that users can create teams and groups with closed data areas themselves and do not have to ask the admins for every action. Information is not scattered around in different inboxes, but thematically together in a common place.
