Forum Discussion
Jul 15, 2016
Techniques Around Helping Users Decide: When To Use What In Office 365
Ignite is coming in only a few months and that means another new "When To Use What In Office 365" session along with an attempt to update and rebuild some of the Whitepaper guidance.
We have our work cut out for us. Would love any community help or support we can get!
What are some great "When To Use What" or Enterprise User Guidance resources you have seen published or shared in the last year?
Once I have reviewed the ones you all share I will try and build a more comprehensive resource list by combining it with the 20 or so I found so far this past year for future reference for everyone. :)
- DeletedAug 24, 2016
Attached a presentation file that we developed, thanks to original work completed by a member of the Office 365 club. Hope it's useful?
- Deleted
Here's a Quick Guide we created to hand out to users. Can be printed as a pamphlet. Its a slight variation to Richard's work.
- Deleted
Here's a Quick Guide we created to hand out to users. Can be printed as a pamphlet. Its a slight variation to Richard's work.
- AntGutCopper Contributor
Richard, with MS pushing heavily on MS Teams (which isn't included in the whitepaper; wasn't GA last year), moving to Stream ("replaced" Video) and so many other changes since publishing the whitepaper (e.g., overall tighter integration between the products), do you have any plans to post an updated version?
Also, with hybrid being a major (multi-year) first step for many organizations, does it make sense to address it when discussing what-when?
thx, AntGut
likQuick response...
RE: Whitepaper - We do hope to update the When To Use What whitepaper/content and have started the process but don't have a firm date (expect it to be broken down into more consumable material than one super whitepaper). Similar to how the adoption whitepaper and how it has related resources (Office365Campaigns.com and Office365Resources.com).
RE: Stream I discussed this at MSIgnite 2016 in my second what to use when talk - https://channel9.msdn.com/events/Ignite/2016/BRK2046?term=Office%20365%20-%20What%20to%20Use%20When - not sure why it's not visible on techcommunities. The gist is that Office 365 Video will be updated w/ Stream capabilities. But you keep using Office 365 Video if you are an O365 customer.
At the most recent Ignite there is a slide shown for 'when to use what' that we agree with (though we think there is a bit more discussion/complexity on the outer/external loop). The depiction of inner loop and outer loop isn't a bad model to think about Teams or Yammer for conversations and collaboration - where SharePoint, sites etc powers the content services behind these.
The biggest issue is whether Teams works for external collaboration at scale today - as we find sales (or external focused business units) in most orgs may struggle since there isn't equivalent external federation like what we have in Skype for Business or the ease of outlook for external comms (yet).
- Deleted UserIron Contributor
Here is nice InfoGraphic I created on this topic...
- Heather NewmanBrass Contributor
Marcel - I love this! Mind if I share it?
P.S. You have a typo in the OneDrive for Business column. "...and share with your colleagues..."
Ooooh, that looks great!
FYI - The session Community Page is now published: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Ignite-Content/BRK2046-Learn-what-to-use-when-Office-365-Groups-SharePoint-Team/m-p/9684/highlight/false#M193
Working hard on finalizing a number of whitepapers and resource kits! Exciting for the event!
- Deleted
Attached a presentation file that we developed, thanks to original work completed by a member of the Office 365 club. Hope it's useful?
- ChristineStackSteel Contributor
The PowerPoint is great. Thanks for sharing. We may model something like that and put it in our SharePoint Help Center.
- Martin_HamersBrass ContributorThanks! Great work!
We have something similar in more of a web page/chart with Consumer Reports style circle icons ("Harvey Balls"). Thanks for sharing.
- Carol DeMuthIron Contributor
Just got back from SharePoint Fest Seattle and heard that a change is coming soon to O365 groups. Instead of just the OneDrive library, creating a group will create an entire Site Collection with Team site features. Also, when creating a site collection, it will automatically create a group. It will help our staff get over the confusion between Groups and SharePoint sites, but will have to look at the admin side of Group creation!
Yes, that is consistent with the info provided at the May 4 Future of SharePoint event.
https://blogs.office.com/2016/05/04/the-future-of-sharepoint/
Did they provide any timelines?
- Carol DeMuthIron Contributor
The person doing the session estimated it would be out in a few weeks, but definitely before Ignite which is September 25th.
- ManfredKOCHCopper Contributor
Hi Richard,
We use internally this decision guide for deciding about file storage. (NWU means per country)
kind regards,
Manfred- Martin_HamersBrass ContributorNice!
- Gregory FrickSteel ContributorThis is good work Richard - It gets even more complex in organizations that use a range of vendors products. At the University of Washington Google apps are very popular and within some departments Confluence Wiki (Atlassian) is the go-to knowledge publishing platform. Still, regardless of the range of products, the user population wants and needs guidance on the best tools to use in their context. Maybe this can be conceived of as a recipe. The recipe includes ingredients, but just having the right ingredients does not guarantee a tasty dish. Ok I have been staring at this post for too long now, thinking about what collaboration or information management dim sum would be. Or what is equivalent to having the right ingredients to make excellent bread, but your oven doesn't maintain temperature reliably. - Greg
- Carol DeMuthIron Contributor
I have been using your white paper to try to explain to people how the business process should drive what tool they need. But they still want to know what all the tools do. So I have been working on a PowerPoint with a slide for each feature. The slide show when to use and when not to use based on your suggestions. But one of the things I added was whether there is an offline download and if so, listing a few of the major functionality differences between the Office 2016 client and Office 365 browser apps. I am thinking of turning it into a wiki to have on our resources site when we launch. I am finding that people seem really confused about the difference.