Forum Discussion
O365 Groups-based Places - Yammer + Teams + Outlook Groups
TonyRedmond great response. Thanks. I think this provides a good point/counter-point for any others wrestling with positioning these 'places' in their enterprise.
I think if one starts with your 7 then everything flows from there. That is, if an individual/enterprise is generally happy and satisfied with the email 'experience' then Outlook Groups can be used to cover most (all?) Teams practical use-cases precisely because of its PROXIMITY to email. On the other hand, if one starts -- as I do and most of the people in my small (less than 500 person) enterprise do -- by finding the email experience ennervating and frustrating then Teams will be more appealing precisely because of its DISTANCE from email.
Note also, that with my 'table' I was primarily summarizing the perspective from my enterprise's actual experience -- rather than attempting to assess for all possible users at all enterprises. In our case Outlook Groups has been around for a year or so and has had very limited pickup and what limited pickup it has had is with inveterate email users who have mostly used it as a file collection and group calendaring tool (which it is quite good at!). I get that it is POSSIBLE to use Planner, to have vibrant conversations, etc. in Outlook Groups. Just hasn't happened organically/naturally in my shop.
Similarly I get that being limited to 'whatever options are provided by Microsoft' can be a 'bug' -- but for my enterprise its a 'feature' (less customization to pay for and manage, less stuff to unwind over time, etc.).
For the record, here's the comparison we use in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.
The facts are that Outlook Groups are enormously popular within Office 365 because a) much of the workload initially moved to the cloud was email, b) the integration into Outlook, which remains the single most important client for most office workers, and c) the ability to replace the old distribution list/public folder combination with a group (some nice migration utilities are also appearing to move PFs to groups, like QUADROtech's ADAM).
If your tenant comes from an Exchange background, Groups will find an easy path to success. Given the number of active mailboxes inside Office 365, fertile ground exists for Outlook Groups.
It will take time for Teams to catch on. They will fill a gap in the collaboration space that's been proven by Slack.
As to Yammer groups, I think that the integration with Office 365 Groups that delivers the shared identity and membership and enables access to SharePoint, Planner, etc. is a great step forward. The problem is that it's about two years too late... and the compliance and other issues that I pointed out haven't gone away.
Thanks. Great attachment!
Again, I think a difference in purview: you - many enterprise/all O365 users; me - my actual enterprise.
For instance, Outlook Groups have NOT been 'enormously successful' in my enterprise. Perhaps in some alternate universe they might have been but... In this actual universe we have had more Teams setup and more posts to Teams in a month than we've had in Outlook Groups in a year. I wouldn't at all be surprised if there is some similar bifurcation in the larger universe that will be observable across a broader sample of enterprises in, say, a year: some enterprises will continue to use Outlook Groups as the primary shared-task focused collaboration (with likely peripheral use of Teams) and others will have the reverse experience. I am not in ANY way trying to argue generally that Teams is better the Outlook Groups or vice versa. Just that one is likely to have a greater cultural appeal in some case than the other.
I completely agree re the lateness of the groupification of yammer (and we are BIG users of Yammer). Ah well...
Tenants who are/were big users of Yammer have often moved away from email as a primary mode for collaboration. It's unsurprising to hear that tenants in this category have not been successful with Outlook groups. On the other hand, Teams are brand-new and don't have an association with email, so it is equally unsurprising to hear that they are being used. The history of work within a company has a huge influence on how technology is used or accepted.