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.
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 
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.
Sandra Lupanava[/caption]
