Last year, during the 2017 Ignite event, Microsoft announced a major shift towards Office 365, rapidly introducing new tools to facilitate this transition. The adoption in practice has been swift, with companies experimenting with various workspaces and different forms of collaboration, which naturally raises some challenges.
Microsoft Teams and SharePoint
Microsoft Teams is now a standard app included in every Office 365 subscription. It allows you to form teams for collaboration, both with internal colleagues and external partners. Within Teams, you can chat, make calls, and collaborate on documents. These documents are stored on a SharePoint site, which is automatically created by MS Teams. This SharePoint site can then be further customized with task lists, issue management, project management tools, and news sections.
Simply put, MS Teams is particularly useful for viewing documents, updates, and communication, whether on a desktop, laptop, or on the go via the MS Teams mobile app. SharePoint, on the other hand, is designed for document editing and leveraging all the advanced document features it offers. SharePoint also has its own mobile app.
At QS solutions, we aim to provide a practical vision, but doing so is currently challenging with all the available Microsoft tools. As always, Microsoft’s tools are continually evolving. This is why, as a Microsoft partner, we offer various tools that better align with practical needs.
From Collaboration Portal to Digital Workspace
In the Netherlands, we work differently than Microsoft might expect. When you look at Office 365, you see a vast array of apps in which it’s easy to get lost. There’s no clear relationship or overview, and you need to be a knowledgeable worker with IT affinity to work independently and productively within it. For this reason, we have been delivering the product Samenwerkportaal, built on SharePoint, for 10 years. With the current shift to Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, we are preparing for a new proposition: the digital workspace.
Two new components of this digital workspace are already prepared for the transition to Office 365:
- Task 365: This Office 365 app gives you control over all tasks scattered across various SharePoint Sites, Planner, Dynamics 365, and Outlook. From one central place, you can get an overview of your tasks and efficiently manage them from a single interface. Learn more about Task 365 here.
- PortalTalk 365: This Office 365 app, which I call the “collaboration director,” allows you to practically manage the creation of workspaces, access management, control over access, and archiving of the workspace. This applies to any type of workspace in Office 365, whether it’s a classic or modern SharePoint site, an Outlook Group, or an MS Team. As an administrator, you gain confidence that you are in control of access and data, ensuring governance. In an upcoming blog, we will delve deeper into PortalTalk 365. Learn more about PortalTalk 365 here.
What About the Intranet?
With SharePoint’s reduced role, it’s easy to forget that many organizations rely on SharePoint as the core of internal communication. Fortunately, Microsoft has addressed this with the introduction of a new site type: the SharePoint Communication site. This provides a standard tool to implement intranet across an organization. However, it’s not fully comprehensive and may not be detailed enough for many customers. Therefore, we are developing new tools around this, as part of our digital workspace offering.
Microsoft now takes Office 365 as the starting point, with SharePoint serving as the stable content carrier behind it. Regardless of where you are in this transition, our tools can help you collaborate more efficiently. Explore our products here for more information.
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