Forum Discussion
O365 Groups-based Places - Yammer + Teams + Outlook Groups
We are working on several artifacts as we make sense of how to use the emerging 'O365 Groups as a Service'-based Places.
1) our enterprise's take on the O365 apps broken down into Places, Tools and Infrastructure
2) a table comparing Yammer, Outlook Groups and Teams
3) a colloquial description of why one might create a groups-based Place in Yammer vs Teams vs Outlook
Would love thoughts and feedback
Nice work!
I agree with @KevinCrossman here about replacing Graph with Delve.
I'm not sure I picked up on it, but another element of "which tool when" is transparency. While it's up to the organization on how to position this, Outlook is basically opaque while Yammer is transparent with more opportunities for discovery and connection-making. Other tools are somewhere in between.
Turnover frequency is another element. How easy is it to onboard new people to your group in Outlook vs. Teams vs. Yammer? I almost want a survey tool where a user can answer some questions and get a recommendation.
Maybe build on capability terminology. As MS continues to build out tools, your chart will quickly become dated. If people understand common capabilities, they'll be better prepared to receive new tech that is designed for them.
Consider whether different groups might need different versions of something like this. Maybe you rollout capabilities to specific audiences with a chart like this specific to key use cases and let other uses evolve from there. Example: I can see Teams being really useful for projects. We're currently recommending Yammer/SharePoint for project collaboration. Based on what I've seen so far, Teams seems like a possible replacement--especially for anything that's not ready or applicable for open discussion.
Delve I'm sure you're both right but I'm shooting for the moon here in getting my colleagues to begin to get that Delve is just the manifestation of the artifact discovery service and that they will eventually see 'delve' INSIDE a bunch of other tools and places. Check in with me in three months and I'll likely be saying 'you told me so'
I'm beginning to think that transparency is a subconsciously charged term and can lead to more rather than less consternation when used by itself --it seems like its meaning is clear but it's not. Transperency has too quite different meanings: Compliance = subject to inspection; Knowledge = open to sharing. Furthermore MS appears to be trying to guide users to make some elements of Outlook (Outlook Groups) more 'public' as Kevin notes above. In my enterprise I care almost completely about the latter -- I am interested in exchanging knowledge both within a known circle and with unknown current and future colleagues. So terms like 'discoverability' and 'access' and 'proximity' are more important to me than 'transparency'. If I was going to grade just transparency I'd have to use odd terms like O=rarely, T=sometimes and Y=mostly.
Turnover frequency is a great term!
Capability - sadly we've already used up the term 'capability' as a formal term of art inside our firm that we've built our whole performance review process around (sort of skills on steroids) so I can't use it here.
Dated - you're probably right about dated but right now I'm trying to get people to see that not everything is a 'tool'. These boards are littered with complaints about 'why is MS releasing another TOOL for collaboration' which sounds almost legimate if Teams, Yammer and Outlook were, in fact, just 'tools'. But they are not in much the same way that Facebook is not a 'tool' and YouTube is not a 'tool'. MS seems to be flirting with the term 'workspace' and I'd happily follow if they'd pick something and stick to it. But whatever term it is it seems quite tactically usefull to say there are a basket of Xs designed to do a specific thing and then they are a basket of Ys that are spaces in which you choose to get work done in over a span of time.
- I like "discoverability" instead of "transparency." You're right in anticipating that some folks would freak over the term. (Can we work in "serendipity"? It's just fun to say!)
I'm really enjoying these high level discussions about the positioning and understanding of the when to use what. That PDF is great also. I've also changed to talking about 365 as a set of tools/services.
I align with you in regards to what I tell clients;
- Yammer is a one to many community based environment
- Teams is a one to few informal persistent chat environment (bonus for unified UX to get things done with less tabs)
- Outlook groups is hyper distribution list. Where you no longer just get the email into the DL but can actually take action and work around these items in one unified place. (other use cases exist but I think this is the easiest to understand. I also talk about seperating internal/external email and getting rid of reply all spam confusion)- Hyper distribution list is much better than next gen or dl on steroids. I'm going to borrow that. Thx.
I'm starting prep to do this exact thing for folks at my company -- rolling out in Jan. So I can appreciate the degree of difficulty...
Some thoughts:
- I don't think the average employee cares or knows about Microsoft Graph. I'd leave that out to reduce complexity. Possible you could replace it with Delve
- Similarly, we know Groups is a foundational element, but it's also a destination.
- We are likely to use the terminolgy as O365 Group Sites and refer to our existing SP /teams/ sites as Team Sites--even though MS does call the Group Sites as Team Sites. Point is that they are more standalone in concept than a vast nested network of sites as with traditional Team Site site collections. This also gives us the opportunity to reinforce the "modern" nature of Group Sites that have fewer "classic" constructs.
- You have some dupes or near dupes in your Outlook vs. Yammer vs. Teams chart. Again, suggest reducing complexity. I do like "Potential for knowledge re-use" as an idea. That's a really good one.
- In theory Microsoft expects many O365 Groups (with Outlook) will be Public and thus discoverable. Are you disabling Public Groups?
- We haven't truly playtested this theory, but I think people are going to understand Groups messages in Outlook using Microsoft's term "next gen distribution lists". Then, it's a matter of trying to understand why they would want to use Yammer instead - or to add Teams or not.
- I really like Microsoft's term "high velocity teams" and tying that to "persistent group chat". I think a lot of people are going to understand why that isn't the same thing at all as Yammer.
- Teams use case: quick conversations with peers (water cooler, who's in the office today, have you seen a certain colleague, where are you with that task, is the outage still going on, who's going to answer the director's question, etc.)
- Yammer use case: "community of interest" conversations (Mac users, home workers, people in a certain building or geo location, groups related to company initiatives or events, broad organization discussions, other event specific conversations - YamJams etc.)
Thx. Great stuff
.groups as foundational vs destination - our lives would be much easier if ms had not used 'groups' for both
.distinguushing SP sites created by o365 groups from other is excellent
. We haven't disabled public outlook groups but they have had very little pickup (we use yammer extensively) I think the initial consternation for our people will be between yammer and teams.
1) O365 apps grouped by 'places', 'tools' and 'infrastructure'
I looked at the PDF. I like the v2 horizontal orientation better.
I definitely view Planner as a destination akin to O365 Video or Group sites. Seems different from Office Online apps.
- Yes, Planner certainly feels like a destination in my own practical use over the past several weeks. I'll go there and hangout and check in on multiple teams.
I'm beginning to think that Planner, Skype and Video are in a hybrid category. They can both be called as a tool from elsewhere AND be a destination of their own?
2) Comparitive Characteristics
Characteristic
Outlook.
Yammer.
Teams.
Interaction type
Correspondence
Discussion
Conversation
Message volume
low
.medium
high
Replies per message
low
Medium
high
Formality
High
Moderate
Low
Audience breadth
Very low
High
Moderate
Discovery possibility
None
High
Low
Variability of group membership
Very low
High
low
Default participant inclusion
Closed
Open
Closed
Self-selection into group
Very low
Very high
low
Potential for knowledge re-use
Very low
Very high
moderate
Time period for knowledge re-use
Short
Longterm
midterm
Use of group calendar
High
Low
High
Use of group files
High
Moderate
High
Use of Planner
Very low
Low
High
Group Purpose
Organizational connection
Topic Exploration
Shared Work (project)
Expected duration of activity
short
long
moderate
I'm not sure I agree about some of these characteristics as listed in the Outlook column.
1. Message Volume - probably lower than Teams, but it can be as high. I have a large group composed mainly of external guest users and the volume is pretty high, with multiple (> 20) replies per item. Remember, an Outlook group is built on top of an Exchange mailbox and that mailbox is capable of storing more than 100,000 items in the folder where conversations are kept.
2. Formality - depends on the organization.
3. Audience breadth - up to 1,000 users (600 for teams, much higher for Yammer). Remember that Groups are created with public access as default, so users can easily find (Discover) new groups and join them as they want. Teams are created as private by default. Also, both OWA and Outlook offer users suggestions about Groups that they might like to join based on signals gathered in the Office Graph, so these groups are pretty open. I think your assessment of "Discovery possibility" is badly flawed as is "Default participant inclusion" (because groups are designed to be open).
4, Potential for knowledge reuse - depends on how the group is used. If groups are used to generate documents, then the knowledge contained in those documents can be shared.
5. Use of Planner - why is this low for Outlook Groups?
6. Expected duration - I have Groups running since their launch in November 2014 and there's no sign of them going away. Again, it depends on the organization.
7. Group purpose - Groups are very good at projects (shared work). IMHO, they are as good as Teams. The choice between the two might be determined by your communication preference.
One thing you miss is compliance. The information held in Yammer and Teams chat is totally invisible to the standard Office 365 compliance functionality. That's a huge gap for Microsoft to fill. Another you could cite is manageability. PowerShell isn't available for Yammer, so the only things you can do is whatever options are provided by Microsoft; the same is largely true for Teams but some of the underlying cmdlets available for Groups work with Teams too. Data soverignity is a further issue for both Yammer and Teams - Outlook Groups use Exchange and are part of Office 365 core data so are held in all datacenters. This is not true for Yammer, Teams (and Planner).
TR
