Last Updated: 2021-05-12.
You've probably heard of or already use Office 365 today, but are wondering if you're really taking advantage of the potential of the product. This is a guide that we continually update to provide an overview and insight into Office 365 and its capabilities based on how Microsoft and customers choose to describe and talk about it. Let's start:
Office 365 (for business) is a collection of products and services from Microsoft. This includes, among other things, a subscription to the Office suite (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) for all your devices, tools for voice and video calls, file sharing and document management, email, social intranet, management of published information (e.g. policies, information pages, management systems), etc.
In short, it includes Office 365 all the tools you need to succeed in your digital workplace. It's the mobile office you always have with you no matter where you are.
With Office 365, you get the modern collaboration tools that let your employees create, find, share, and collaborate digitally. Writing and sharing documents, storing tasks, managing projects, etc. Users get tools that are continuously improved and automatically kept up to date at the rate we have become accustomed to in a cloud-based world.
Of course, all the tools work whether you want to log in from your mobile, your work laptop or from the country library in Denmark.
Below we will go through more structured what each thing is so that you can more easily understand why it is important for you and your company.
This is what we go through:
- How do people usually end up in Office 365?
- How did we end up in the cloud?
- The Parts of Office 365
- The Office suite, the Office applications for all your devices
- SharePoint
- Microsoft Teams
- Skype for Business
- Exchange/Outlook
- OneDrive
- Yammer
- Automatic Power (fd Flow)
- Power Apps
- Microsoft Forms
- Planner
- OneNote
- To-Do (Tasks)
- Microsoft 365
- Office 365 Gruppen
- Final Thoughts
How do people usually end up in Office 365?
A common scenario is that the company has begun to grow and you no longer have full control of all the information or processes that exist. It's getting harder to work together and you feel like you're doing things that you've already done before. You are looking for digital order and you want structure on your information simply.
Or when you have an existing system that is starting to get a little old and needs replacing.
Many people first come into contact with Office 365 products when they need to move their email to the cloud and want a subscription to the Office suite that scales up and down with the number of users. This step is often taken for purely cost and safety reasons.
Now we're starting to look towards KPIs that have to do with efficiency, productivity and quality — and that's where Office 365 as a whole starts to get really powerful.
How did we end up in the cloud?
SharePoint is today the engine that handles most document and file storage in Office 365 services — although it is not always visible to end users.
When you collaborate on a document in a real-time chat with Microsoft Teams, the program works behind the hood directly against a team site in SharePoint - exciting, isn't it?
Time for a short history lesson (hold on! We promise it will be needed to keep up)
In the past, many companies had their own server in the basem*nt with an installed version of SharePoint. All files, documents, information pages, group calendars, etc. were stored there.
It was also common for highly customized functionality to be built and embedded in SharePoint in an effort to have “a central platform where everything is.” The idea was good, 1 application - 1 thing to maintain and invest in.
The major upgrades to the platform were then done roughly every 3 years with mixed results, usually depending on how much customizations had been made. It was the back of the 1 application tank.
By the time the cloud began to rise (pardon the pun), Microsoft was already well ahead with a cloud version of SharePoint, which they began to upgrade more and more frequently. The first version was released back in 2010.
Nowadays, barely a week passes before something new has appeared or something old has changed.
This is one of the strengths of the cloud - it goes fast and we can quickly face changing conditions in the market.
However, a potential disadvantage (in our opinion an advantage) is that the scope for extensive customizations was reduced because all millions of customers needed to be able to upgrade to the new version. Customers also began to question whether maintenance costs were reasonable in relation to productivity gains.
What that led to was that Microsoft could start offering more targeted products that were really good at what they were doing, using Office 365 as a foundation.
It went from being a central platform (SharePoint) to spreading out to individual applications that all do their thing well (Office 365). The various apps collaborate behind the scenes with a much sounder technological infrastructure.
It enables a completely different plug & play mindset where your own applications can be stitched together the parts of Office 365 that are right for your business in a smooth way and where you can actually also remove parts as news appears on the market, partly from Microsoft but also from 3rd parties.
The Office suite, the Office applications for all your devices
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. are the old common products almost everyone on the planet knows. But now it's no longer just Office for the PC. Today, Office is also available for the web, mobile and tablet.
You can purchase an Office 365 license that includes, or does not include, the Office suite. The absolute most common is to buy the one that contains it.
SharePoint
SharePoint is the cloud service where you store files and information that multiple people need to access. It's an entire platform for collaboration across organizational, departmental, and team boundaries for companies of all sizes. Microsoft calls it “Your mobile, intelligent intranet.”
The goal of SharePoint is to be able to create, share, find and collaborate on information across the enterprise, as well as to inform and engage, leverage your collective knowledge, and transform business processes.
With SharePoint team sites or groups, you manage a team or project's documentation, either as documents or directly in the shared OneNote notebook that comes with each SharePoint team site, and to disseminate information, you create pages and news directly in SharePoint.
In addition to this, you can view information from other sources in various ways through integrations, either using those available out of the box or by customizing them with the help of developers.
The vast majority of people who use SharePoint set up a standardized start page and redirect all employees' browsers to have it as their home page. There you add quick links to other applications, company news, navigation to other parts/team rooms etc., calendar and other things that you want everyone to see at least once a day. A way to stitch the whole solution together and make it feel like an entrance to everything you have.
In modern SharePoint, we usually talk about two different types of surfaces; Teamsiter and Communication site. You can actually guess from the name pretty well what each type of site is for and it also shows that SharePoint sits on a couple of different hats. Your information pages, policies, manuals, etc. go to the communication sites - the collaboration, projects and departments end up on the team sites.
Many of the world's best intranets are built on SharePoint so you've probably already encountered it even if it was called something else in your workplace.
Microsoft Teams
Teams is a hub for real-time collaboration across your organization - conversations, chat, voice, video and conferencing
Groups (as we mentioned above) _can_ have Teams enabled, and if there is a Team, there is also a SharePoint site.
Each group in Teams has one or more channels — see these as groupings of discussions. #Allmänt is the default channel that every Team gets. For the marketing team, you might want a couple of other channels like #Vårkampanjen2021, #Idéhörnan, #Omvärldsbevakning or the like and in the Finance team you might want #Budget and #Rapporter.
For each group, a document library is automatically created, where all the team's files and documents are saved and created according to the structure of one folder per channel. The channel structure in Teams is also reflected in SharePoint and in OneDrive as document folders for the different channels.
One exciting thing about teams is the ability to connect integrations with other systems. For example, in #Omvärldsbevakning you can automatically get competitors' public news published, in #Vårkampanjen2021 you might want to see as soon as someone has started a task in Planner, and in #Idéhörnan you want to see when someone has created a formal improvement proposal in a SharePoint list (you can do such feeds with out of the box “apps” in Teams or using Power Automate)
Skype for Business
Skype provides real-time chat, VoIP, audio, video and web conferencing - i.e. the same things as Teams fixed teams have more features so the choice from Microsoft is quite logical. Microsoft is currently working on incorporating Skype for Business into Teams. You can continue to use Skype for Business for a while, as it will take a while for Microsoft to get the full story of how Teams will replace Skype.
Exchange/Outlook
This is usually what gets people's eyes on Office 365. Outlook gives you cloud-stored email, tasks, and calendars that are stored securely and accessible wherever you are.
A very good alternative to having an email server in the basem*nt that needs to be upgraded and managed simply.
OneDrive
Store and share personal files belonging to your company in an easy way no matter where you are.
The goal of OneDrive is for you to have secure access to your files no matter where you are in the world and from any device.
OneDrive gives each user 1TB of storage, which should cover most needs.
A lot of work from Microsoft lately has been put into creating a simple experience for sharing files with others. You can now collaborate in real time on the same document as a vendor you shared a file with and know that everything is stored versioned in OneDrive. For example, if someone accidentally deletes everything from the file, it can be restored from an earlier version. This is a security that makes it easier to adopt a collaborative approach compared to the previous one where only complete versions were shared between employees via email.
Since you can send a link to a document, you also avoid working on different versions and ultimately having to merge emailed changes from 10 different documents.
Yammer
Yammer is the product in Office 365 that is most similar to a forum or Facebook. You have groups and you have feeds where people (or bots) can write posts, comment, share and like. At first glance, the overlap with Teams is quite large and choosing the right one can be difficult. Today, we advocate using Teams unless you have a very specific business case that makes Yammer the right choice.
Automatic Power (Flow)
Power Automate is one of the most interesting products that have appeared on the market in recent times. The purpose of the tool is simple: Automation of business processes.
The product is aimed not only at developers but also so-called PowerUsers who, with a graphical interface (and sometimes with the support of developers), can automate very complex flows.
Example: Say that when HR marks a new employment contract as “Signed”, it automatically creates a new user in Office 365, we send out welcome emails to the new employee, have them read through policies, notify the janitor that new keys need to be created, give them access to the intranet and department site, send an email to the gym asking for a new gym card to be issued, etc. All completely automatically. When everyone in the chain pressed “ok” on their respective part, the manager receives a notification that “now Eva is fully onboarded, time to start the skills development” - i.e. a new flow has started.
Or an example of a more technically complex flow: When a salesperson marks a deal won in Salesforce, we automatically create a SharePoint project surface and copy over the templates that that type of project needs and invite whoever is in charge.
This type of automation can save a lot of time and money.
PowerApps
A relatively new tool for creating customized applications and mobile apps used in the company, at a much lower cost than previously required.
Driving records that use the phone's GPS, app to register for events and communicate with participants when the event takes place with integrated maps to premises, etc., simple holiday application or sick notice directly from the mobile phone. These are examples of solutions that can be created in PowerApps and do not need anything other than SharePoint and other parts of Office 365 to work.
Microsoft Forms
How often do you need to send out surveys and surveys to customers and employees? Or collect information from multiple employees in a variety of formats? Answer one question in free text and another question with options, rate the boss with stars and show the comment bar only if you put 2 stars or less. These are the scenarios that will be easy to provide with Microsoft Forms.
Imagine, on the surface of HR in SharePoint, being able to bake a form where users themselves can apply for vacations or report discrepancies. It is now easy to do.
Planner
Planner is a simple project management tool to keep groups in sync around work that should, need, have, and is in the process of being done. If you've ever come across Trello, you'll understand right away what it is.
The whole idea is based on planning visually in an interactive interface where you drag-and-drop organize your tasks into what are called “buckets”. You can group and filter by status, who is assigned to the task, category, and several other ways. It is a powerful tool that can give you an overview of everything you work with in different teams, for example through the “My tasks” section of the application.
You have access to all your data, for all your teams, on all your devices through dedicated applications for the web and mobile.
OneNote
OneNote is an application for taking notes, information gathering, and collaboration between multiple users.
A notebook in OneNote works much like a binder with tabs for different topics. Under each tab are a number of different pages with varied content.
Here you can collect notes, pictures, lists, audio comments and sketches and sort in different tabs. Everything is digital and is in the cloud. This means that you can always access your notes wherever you are. Your notes are also searchable.
Take notes by typing with the keyboard or by hand or drawing. OneNote lets you organize and reuse your notes across all your devices.
To-Do (Tasks)
To-do lists with your day in focus. Microsoft To-Do lets you manage, prioritize, and complete the most important tasks you need to do every day. Create tasks in Outlook and prioritize and manage in To-Do so you can spend time on what's important.
Microsoft 365
This isn't simple (and probably something you'll want to get help with if you're not already on the skills). So hold on to your hat.
Office 365 is part of an offering called Microsoft 365. The offer extends to products that can, for example, push the right applications to your computer/mobile. AutoPilot makes it much easier for us to automate all the company's devices. When you unpack your new computer, it will configure itself via the cloud according to all the company's policies - you as a user just need to boot and run.
Office 365 Gruppen
Groups is not an application, but a concept you need to know.
They are a concept that can be difficult to adopt but they are a fundamental part of the Office 365 world and something that Microsoft is betting very much on.
A group is, in short, a set of persons and rights that receive a number of different resources linked to them in a number of different services. Not entirely easy to understand.
Groups are a way to create collaboration spaces across multiple Office 365 tools at once.
Think about it this way: You probably want the same people who have access to the group in Teams to have access to the group's documents in SharePoint and the group's email in Outlook. As time goes on, more and more of this interconnectedness is added to groups.
It's so far quite complicated for end users to keep track of what happens when you create a group because the decision _where_ you create your group from causes it to behave differently. A group created from Yammer doesn't get the same things attached to it out of the box as a group created from Microsoft Teams or from SharePoint.
For example, if you create a group from Teams, you get channels in teams, a SharePoint team site, document libraries in SharePoint, a shared notebook in OneNote, and a shared email mailbox in Outlook. However, if you create a group in Yammer, you get conversation in Yammer, a SharePoint team site, and a shared notebook in OneNote, but no shared mailbox and no Teams group are created.
In summary, Office 365 provides access to modern IT tools that let your employees create, find, share, and collaborate digitally. The tools are constantly evolving and improving, and new features are being added all the time to make it easier to create and share documents, store tasks, manage projects and communicate.
Because everything is cloud-based, the tools work from all your devices so whether you want to log in from your mobile, your work laptop or from the office, you'll always access your files and can pick up where you left off last time.
Did you get a better idea of what Office 365 means after reading the above walkthrough?
Feel free to share the text with a colleague or on social media and get in touch with your thoughts and ideas on how we can make the description even better.
