Forum Discussion
Matt Wolodarsky
Microsoft
MicrosoftTop Office 365 Adoption Challenges
Hi - curious to know what are the top adoption challenges people are facing when rolling out Office 365 in their organization?
Finding that people on the Very Uncomfortable side of the comfortable-with-technology spectrum are bewildered by all the choices and go back to Outlook on their desktop, so we are making Yammer a priority first to aid communication - so later we can explain 'what these things on the Waffle do, what we want you to use them for, and this is how to use them'.
The other issue is the people on the other side of the spectrum have run off confidently into the wilderness and started using things we aren't quite ready for them to play with yet! Hopefully we can concertina that spectrum a little bit with some applied learning so there is less of a gap.
Someone already commented on this, but it does really depend on what services you are rolling out, Exchange would present completely different challenges to Yammer for example.
Speaking from a SharePoint (and to a lesser extent OneDrive, Yammer), there are probably at least two major challenges.
1. The evergreen nature of O365 causes challenges around comms, adoption and sometime user sentiment as features are constantly evolving, deprecated or being added to the service. As an example I noticed last week that the SharePoint/Delve profile page had changed (only slightly) from a horizontal tab construct to a vertical one. This is a small change, but unless I missed the comms it was not advertised and the change went through with no comms from any of the clients I am working with. This caused a number of helpdesk tickets to be raised and some negative comments to be raised in the newsfeed etc.
2. One of the areas I have been particularly sensitive to is identifying new features in the roadmap and ensuring that unless there is absolutely no other option these features are not replicated by custom solutions both from a cost, but also maintainability perspective. Managing the comms or stakeholder discussion around why a feature that may be desired should be put on hold for an unknown period of time because MS will release a similar feature in the future can be tricky.
There are a number of other challenges including governance, security, training especially around document lifecycles which can be challenging.
