Office 365 “Collaboration Couples” and their Role in Enterprise UC

Microsoft’s effort on spreading Office 365 is well visible. According to the latest report on the state of SharePoint and Office 365 customisation by Rencore, the predominance of the cloud collaboration platform became even stronger in 2018, while previously popular SharePoint Server versions keep losing their positions.

According to the report, 74% of surveyed individuals working with SharePoint Online and Office 365 (compared to 68% in 2016). By comparison, SharePoint 2013 was the most common SharePoint version with 72% of users in 2016, while in 2018 this ratio dropped to 59%.

These changes can be explained not only by quite an aggressive promotion of the cloud suite but also by the overall organisational strive for adopting the concepts of a digital workplace and unified communications.

Indeed, Office 365 enables their owners to create a well-balanced collaboration environment that brings together different communication channels and tools. However, just switching to Office 365 doesn’t guarantee painless collaboration. As the Microsoft cloud comes with a whole package of Office 365 collaboration tools, it is often difficult for organisations to understand how to use them effectively for internal and external collaboration, which may cause a collaboration jumble. To prevent it, organisations look for a feasible Office 365 adoption strategy to follow.

What is the strategy for introducing Office 365 collaboration tools?

Among the most popular approaches to Office 365 collaboration is Microsoft’s use cases guidance. It explains which Office 365 collaboration app covers best this or that collaboration scenario.

This general framework has its downsides, though.

First, as Office 365 evolves and its application set changes, end users might feel confused about choosing the proper scenario for an unlisted tool (for example, Microsoft Stream). It also doesn’t emphasise three types of SharePoint sites (team, communication, and hub sites) that serve different collaboration purposes.

But even clear scenarios for every app can’t guarantee that employees won’t face a messy collaboration if they keep dealing with all apps at once.

To address this challenge, in some cases, it can be more reasonable for enterprises to turn their attention to possible Office 365 collaboration couples instead of handling a bunch of apps.

Possible Office 365 collaboration couples

The concept of Office 365 collaboration couples is based on the idea of two core tools that take up the major collaboration load. It’s not about limiting employees’ actions and prohibiting them to use all the available apps, but about choosing essential collaboration areas to host internal and external collaboration.

Let’s take a look at some possible couples and see how they can serve different collaboration purposes:

SharePoint and Yammer

This couple can put together content-centric collaboration and forum-like communication. SharePoint Online helps employees to accumulate, share and cowork on various types of content, including documents, media files, and knowledge. At the same time, Yammer backs up SharePoint by enabling users to communicate more dynamically on Yammer feeds and create collaboration groups.

Depending on users’ needs, Yammer can go together with SharePoint team or communication sites. The first option can be great to manage project team collaboration or communicate with customers. The second option can be optimal for marketing, sales, and R&D departments that can share their activities with large audiences on communication sites, while collecting feedback, answering questions, and aggregating ideas in Yammer groups.

SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

Another powerful tandem brings together the versatile capabilities of SharePoint and real-life communication in Microsoft Teams. In this couple, Microsoft Teams can come to the foreground to support continuous collaboration with internal and external users, while SharePoint can serve as a file storage. These tools can help employees to support the right balance between formal and informal communication. This collaboration couple also covers different communication types (text, voice, and video), thus being a capable unified communication medium.

SharePoint and Outlook

This couple can be a great enabler for document-oriented teams that collaborate at a moderate pace. While SharePoint can host large volumes of collaboration content, Outlook supports email-centric communication. Such a tandem can be particularly effective for external collaboration with partners and customers or internal collaboration in HR, accounting, or legal departments. As in the case with Yammer, Outlook can go in combination with SharePoint team or communication sites (or both of them) depending on the needed collaboration coverage.

Microsoft Teams and Stream/Sway

An antipode of the previous couple, Microsoft Teams and one of the media file management applications, Stream or Sway, will be a suitable collaboration medium for dynamic and active teams. This duo can empower departments that work with media and graphical content intensively and need to discuss their works with peers in real time while paying less attention to long-term content accumulation.

Obviously, there are other options to form collaboration couples for your employees. So, if your organisation goes for Office 365 consulting, you can ask your service provider to adjust the collaboration couples to the needs of particular departments and teams. For comfortable external collaboration, you can put together Yammer and Outlook, for project and task-oriented communication – Microsoft Teams and Planner. It is still important to combine apps that enable different types of communication and collaboration. Thus, coupling Yammer and Microsoft Teams can be quite ineffective as they address similar communication needs but don’t allow users to switch to content-centric collaboration.

How can collaboration couples help?

Now, let’s take a look at 3 challenges that enterprises can address with Office 365 collaboration couples.

Eliminating the early adoption chaos

If your organisation just makes the first steps in Office 365 collaboration, handling all apps at once can be difficult both from usage and management standpoints. Even if your organisation previously used SharePoint as an intranet platform, employees can feel confused about using new collaboration tools. From the very beginning, users can try out collaboration couples that will help them cover their daily needs.

For example, a marketing department can use SharePoint Online communication site to post generally available materials, a SharePoint team site to collaborate within the department, and Yammer to collaborate with other users, answer their questions, and get feedback. Later on, they can add Microsoft Teams to their daily collaboration stack.

Dealing with collaboration couples can be easier than with Office 365 Groups

Office 365 Groups are shared workspaces within Office 365 that are to provide teams with ready-made spaces for diversified collaboration. However, Groups create a certain confusion in an already complicated environment as they result in the proliferation of collaboration areas.

For example, when you create a group through Yammer you get a Yammer site, a SharePoint library, a OneNote notebook, a Stream channel, and a PowerBI site. When you create another group in Outlook, you get the same portion; only instead of a Yammer channel, you get an Outlook inbox and calendar.

Thus, if a team creates two groups in different apps, they get two different libraries, notebooks, and channels, which forces users to navigate between detached collaboration zones. While in collaboration couples, users can build up their communications within a centralised collaboration domain.

Fostering organisations without comprehensive Office 365 subscription

Collaboration couples can go beyond Office 365 and can help organisations that don’t buy full cloud subscriptions but own separate apps. For example, teams that leverage a SharePoint Online team site in the standalone app and a server version of Skype for Business can have a more positive collaboration experience than teams that try to tame all Office 365 apps at once.

Office 365 collaboration couples can minimise impersonalised unification

Office 365 collaboration couples can address one of the core problems of unified communications that is a total unification. Organisations should remember that different teams need different collaboration and communication tools to stay effective in their activities. By providing particular departments and teams with a collaboration couple that they prefer, companies can avoid unneeded confusion, facilitate the adoption of collaboration tools, and make internal and external communication truly personalised.

Guest Blog by SharePoint and Office 365 Evangelist at Itransition, Sandra Lupanava