Forum Discussion
Do end users need formal training on Office 365 apps?
HI Graham McHugh - This is a great question. I'd encourage you to redefine what "training" means in our current environment. What we find is that many people are unlikely to attend an actual class but the demand for short videos that are task or scenario based is high. Think "playlists" like on Spotify or on your music library. People need to know something exactly when they need to know it so we're going that direction overall.
That being said there is always some demand for virtual or instructor based training that helps people "get" the basics of what the new experience is. 45 minutes seems to be a sweet spot for these trainings. The virtual version is good because we find people stop and start the trainings to try things in the product. Also it's a best practice to establish internal Champions and these folks usually are highly engaged in more in depth training.
Remember all training needs to be in the context of what's in it for the users themselves. What I think is super cool may not help someone else in a particular role. This is why we're so fond of the playlist model and integrated this into our Custom Learning for Office 365 training site template which will be broadly available in Q1/CY19. This SharePoint Online site template with a custom Webpart will allow you to customize the playlists, included products and look/feel of the experience and it's easily pinned in Teams. We'll announce its availability here and in the Driving Adoption community as well.
At the end of the day this is our chance to increase the digital literacy of our workforce and (as I always say) get people to STOP emailing that spreadsheet around! Hope this helps.
Lots of good ideas there, Eric -- thanks. Would you mind sharing which contextual help system you purchased? And would you recommend it? I think it's important to make it easy for users to learn about the various apps. To that end, https://office365trainingportal.com/ makes it easy to access the major Office 365 resources from one central location.
I think Microsoft offers some great resources to help users. The problem is that it's scattered around lots of places. At least in my experience, a lot of times when I find something good, it's when I'm looking for something else.
The site you linked is an improvement - it aggregates some of their help content. A lot of the official one-off articles / videos that you find when Googling aren't in there, though. It also requires that the users have enough interest to go to that site and look for an answer. The new help panel that MS is providing with the '?' button within the O365 UI is nice too - but it's search driven rather than being truly contextual. The user has to know what something's called and then manually scan through a long list of possibilities to find basic answers. That's fine for the kind of user that is personally invested in the platform, but for the average end user who only cares about what they're trying to accomplish right now - I think it's less than optimal.
The contextual system we chose at Visa was VisualSP, but there are a few out there to choose from. (Full disclosure, I joined the VisualSP team when I left Visa. I respect the neutral nature of forums like this, so I'm only mentioning it by name because you asked.) The advantage of a context-driven system is that the user doesn't have to go look for help in a separate site or filter through a bunch of unrelated tutorials to find the one they want. It delivers only relevant help items directly to the user while they're working in the platform. I think it's super powerful when you start to create custom help items, too. Custom solutions you build, governance details, common questions your users ask... You can publish them to users when and where they're likely to need them. If you start directing people there when they have questions, then they start to find answers on their own, too.
VisualSP looks like a useful product -- obviously a lot of work has gone into it. I think one of the biggest challenges with developing training/support content for Office 365 is how rapidly it is changing -- for example, the architecture and functionality of modern SharePoint sites is drastically different from classic SharePoint, and requires a whole new way of planning/implementing (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/information-architecture-modern-experience, to name a couple of big changes).
Keeping up with the changes is challenge enough for tech-types, for non-techie end users it's a very confusing time, with multiple apps that do similar things (for example, Yammer, Teams, Skype). Which is why I think it's important to provide end users with quality training (a combination of the many suggestions in this thread), resources, direction, and, perhaps most importantly, the time to learn.