When To Use What in Office 365

The slide answers visually what has often been a very challenging question to answer – namely, “What Microsoft collaboration tool should I use for scenario X?” The principles are simple:

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is best suited for scenarios where you are working with a group of people on a given project. These are the people in your “Inner Loop” (or “Circle of Trust” as I prefer to call them). Because Microsoft Teams is built on Office 365 Groups, this group of people will have access to the SharePoint site created by default for each Team. That’s where I can share documents and files with the Team. If you’re a member of that Team – you have access. Since an Office 365 Group is also mail-enabled, I can send email to the Team channel so that everyone has access to the information in the email. Teams also incorporates all the features you love from Skype for Business – Instant Messaging, Presence, Conferencing, calling capabilities, etc… Teams keeps the conversations in a persistent, threaded format, so we can always go back and review questions that came up or decisions that were made. And with the recently announced Guest Access capabilities for Teams, you can extend the reach of your Team outside your organization. In effect, Microsoft Teams is a portal into Office 365.

Yammer

Yammer expands the scope of who has access to a given set of content and the conversations. The people in your Yammer group are the “Outer Loop”. Sure, you still like and trust the people in your Outer Loop, but it’s a different type of interaction. Information and conversations flow much more organically and is likely not going to be project -specific. At Microsoft, our Yammer groups are more likely to be cantered around certain technologies (such as Skype for Business Voice) or areas of expertise (“Security” or “Education”) than to be focused on a project (“Contoso Azure Deployment”). This allows for people to jump into Yammer groups at any time and still benefit from the historical knowledge of the Yammer group. And just like with Teams, new Yammer groups are built on Office 365 Groups, so the Yammer group has access to OneNote, a Planner for managing tasks, a SharePoint team site and document library.

Outlook

And then there’s Outlook. Good old, reliable, “I know how to use this”, Outlook. We all know that Outlook is often the easiest tool for sharing a file….one time. But things start to get sticky when you have to ask multiple people to edit the document or comment on it. Then we run into versioning issues, and you have to find the right copy of the file in your email thread…it’s just not the best tool for really collaborative work on a large team. Rather, Outlook is good for targeted communications – confirming an appointment with a customer, verifying information in a proposal, asking your boss for days off (which is personally my favourite email to write). Now the neat thing is that Outlook also allows you to connect to the mailboxes for Office 365 Groups. This allows you to view and reply to email messages that land in the mailbox of the Office365 Groups you are a member of directly from your Outlook client.

White Paper: “When to use What” by Richard Harbridge