Resource Roundup: Understanding Office 365

I’m attending the Advanced Learning Institute’s Internal Communications for a Dispersed Workforce this week. I had the honor of being a panelist on the experts panel discussion yesterday.  Throughout the day, I heard a number of companies say they are moving to Office 365 and have questions about what Office 365 tool to use for what purpose.

There are a number of resources that  I would recommend for answering these questions.

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  • To compare the different enterprise license options, start here
  • For a summary of what each Office app does, consider the Office 365 Periodic Table by MVP Matt Wade with help from Niels Gregers Johansen.

 

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Matt’s also got another infographic called the Document Circle of Life that explains when to use OneDrive versus when to use SharePoint.

MVP Michelle Caldwell has also summarized What to Use When nicely on one of her slides:

Click the above image of slide 62 to be taken to it in her slide decks on Slideshare. In the same deck, slide 21 talks about generational communication preferences that you may need to account for in your digital workplace.

And finally, if you are wondering when to use Yammer versus when to use Teams, it is laid out clearly here:

 

 

 

Specifically, your Inner Loop is those people you people you work on regularly on core projects, while your outer loop is people you connect with openly across the organization. Yammer is for Outer Loop, Teams is for Inner Loop. Except that for smaller companies the distinction becomes blurred – you could just use Teams for both.  But for organizations that are on the larger side, Yammer as a company-wide set of discussion forums and Teams as a hub for daily teamwork makes sense.

–Michael