The Office 365 Groups Disconnect

Steven, truefully Yammer and Outlook remaining disconected is still a problem.  Unless on the org level you just decide to no implement one of those tools.  Seeing as Outlook is needed for email I don't see that being what would get dropped.

Here is the Yammer/Outlook problem.  Lets say that I create a Yammer group.  Sure, I believe it sends some sort of email after that to let the user know.  BUt after that the group isnt discoverable.  The user is spends there time in Outlook, which had there other groups, but this new group is out of site.  This will unfortunatly hinder the participation in the group, or at least make it a little more cumbersome.  Then you have the even bigger issue.  Yammer/Outlook are so seperated that if you create your office365 group from yammer and essentially have a yammer backed group.  The group is entirely innaccessable from Outlook.  No Notes/files/planner/calendar.  Nothing.

The Outlook/Team issue is the one I have already gon over in it becomes very easy to split the conversation.  This is also a Yammer/Teams issue.

Workers will fall into one of two categories.  Those that try to figure things out in order to benifit ftom the team tools, and the ones who say this is just to much work and say if you need me email or call me.

It seems like with Office 365 groups, microsoft said let figure out how to create a bridge across tools.  That way as we creat tools we can keep them bridged together.  Even though the complete integration picture is not painted based on the roadmap they are working on planner and the other current disconnects.  However they are embrassing the conversation disconecct.  It seems to me to be anti mission.

Now with every tool they will make to engage in a conversation, they will just add to this disconnect.  For example Outlook/Yammer has always been disconnected.  Outlook groups addressed Sharepoint, OneNote, and new tools like Planner and what ever else may come down the line.  But they saw Yammer and said, let keep that seperated.  Then they make a new conversation tool, teams and say, cool lets bring the same sharpoint and everything else attache as a group resource to the party.  But again lest keep conversation seperated.  

Ammitedly, the conversation peice may be the hardest one.  But it certainly wouldnt be impossible to have an email show in the Team feed, or yammer (actually i beleive you can send to yammer group via the office 365 group email).  Just plain wierd not to make it accessable as an Outlook Group as well.

Look office 365 groups is a good step forward.  And connectors will be the main way to work around the issues for now, but this wont be as good as if there was an integrated storry for this. I mean connectors were supposed to be for third party integrations.  Yammer is going to be the interesting one.  Its implementation of groups is just plain wierd.  For now we are simply keeping it disabled.   So we dont create a bigger mess like what we had with teams.  Yammer is a good product, if we were to enable it though, someone would click on it and play with it and it is so disconnected becasue it has 0 visibilty accross tools, it will be a nightmare for our users.  We would have subgroups that have little inner circle conversation in yammer away from the rest of the group.

Teams is my absolute favorite.  I love the UI/UX.  It fits the way I work and desire to communicate to a team.  If it could pull in email to the chat channel, and allow me to send one off emails  through chat.  I would unistall outlook and be forever thankful it was out of my life.  Perhaps this is the root of my issue.  I feel like microsoft had the oportunity to finally say, "However you decide to use our tools ans to work we have you covered"  You like the instant message feature of teams, allong with the tabbed interface and control over the team envireoment.  Bam use Teams.  You like the email workflow, and the power email tool in Outlook, with categories, folders, flags. retention policies.  Bam use Outlook. Same goes for yammer and sharpoint.

But instead they keep things just enough seperated that you have to jump around the entire ecosystem still, the overall gain of office365 groups is marginallized becasue of it.