Forum Discussion
Help Us Understand Office 365 User Needs
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Dear Sharon,
One of the key points I have noticed is that, during the days when users used Office documents in shared folders off Windows server that were designated as file servers, they often created their process of collaborating using emails as well as by mapping drive letters to these Windows Shares.
In case of Excel documents, they go further and link up several Excel workbooks inside formulae inside other similar Excel worksheets.
When we introduced Office 365 to cover our 10000 odd user Base in MAS Holdings Sri Lanka (the company I work in), we noticed challenges in moving these Excel sheets to Share Point Online based document libraries, because of the complex formula links to other Excel sheets.
Therefore we are currently embarking on a project, where we study the process that the user has been having and understand the UNDERLYING PROBLEM to find a better solution with Office 365 and SharePoint Online Libraries.
That way, we bring in all the user's who access shared worksheets together and demonstrate a new process that is dependent on Office 365, using the shared worksheets to identify the user group, rather than having a disconnected adoption session.
We must always use the problem and demonstrate a solution.
The solution must be easy and consistent in its value.
There cannot be any bugs in the solution. If there is, they must be addressed fast.
Then adoption will happen.
Nobody needs to put in extra effort for adoption, unless of course to overcome any company-culture issue, which is hopefully very rare these days.
Hi Senaka,
Thank you for the feedback. We also believe SharePoint Online and and OneDrive offer much better ways of collaborating on content than traditional file shares including, modern email attachments, anywhere access, co-authoring, etc. But the move can have migration and change management elements to it.
I reached out to the Excel product team and they aren't aware of any issues with SharePoint Online references in formulas. These should work just as they would on a file share. You can learn more about how Excel stores links in workbooks here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/328440/description-of-link-management-and-storage-in-excel. Basically, if the files are stored together in the same folder, they can be moved together and the links will just work. If the files are not stored together in the same folder, or they are not moved at the same time or to the same folder, then someone will need to go into each Excel file that has links to other files and verify or fix the links so that they are targeting the correct location of the linked files.
I hope this helps and if you do find a product issue during your investigation please let us know.
- Thank you Aaron.
It helps very much...! In fact I found it the hard way sometime back... and I had to because these were the "road blocks" to adoption. That was why I replied Sharon in order to illustrate the need to identify the practical aspects... Incidentally, I shared your web-link to our users and IT support folk.
Thanks...
- So that the key point is to check on the existing documents and shares and address the need for that in a different way using Office 365, where users see better value. The other tools such as Teams, Teams Video or Skype for Business will enrich the experience making messaging more actionable than email, and thereby fostering IMMEDIATE and ADHOC collaboration. Nothing is more catchy, than we folk giving users the ability to act fast in a way their team always follows those actions in real time, irrespective of where they are located...! There is also the additional concern of security and Intellectual Property protection, which is addressed by Microsoft but which we feel is not addressed together with the solution, and is taken up via EMS. Companies get worried when Microsoft discontinued certain products midway (example Azure Remote) and they ask whether the same thing will happen to Office 365 as well...! These are valid questions... and Adoption suffers as a result if there is no comprehensive and simple answer...
