Office 365 comprises of a lot of services and features which can be overwhelming for an end user. More often than not, we hear concerns from organizations and individual users of how roll out of new products and technologies fail. I do not see this as a technology problem, rather a communication and change management issue.
At Perficient, we deal with this day in and day out and understand the importance of a successful roll out. Any big technology implementation requires a significant investment (time and effort) towards creating and utilizing process, training, and governance. It’s not just big talk, but an extremely important undertaking when moving your platform to the cloud (Office 365).
When we look at a typical day in life of an end user from the time they start their day to the time they shut down their devices (and brains), they go through their emails, work on documents, involve in conversations (phone or messaging), search for content, and much more. Office 365 connects all of these tasks and make it seamless so it’s tightly interwoven. In this post I will take the opportunity to showcase few of these scenarios and demonstrate how a day would look like for an office 365 user.
Most of us our used to starting our day with emails (esp. on the phone). Things start to segue into conversations and documents from there on. This forms the basis of the following list of actions:
Sign In – Our user (Amy) logs in to her device using Office 365 credentials
Productivity Suite – Amy sees the productivity suite comprising of Yammer, OneDrive, SharePoint (Sites), Outlook (Exchange), Lync, Dynamics CRM.
Email -She opens Outlook 2013. Checks and responds to emails.
Sharing – While checking emails she sees the need for sharing document(s) with other team members. Sends email with link to the document (residing in OneDrive).
Authoring – Realizes she has a meeting coming up with her external partners which requires co-editing a document previously created. Goes to OneDrive and opens the shared document. Co edits the document along with her coworker. Realizes both could edit the document simultaneously. Document is automatically saved back to the site. Shares the document with external partners directly from OneDrive (respecting the security at the site level). This allows her to maintain the document security and still share with external users all in one place without the need to use yet another application.
Search- Need to run in another meeting and present a deck she created last week. Goes to her Office 365 Delve tab and goes to the “Shared with me” feature. Delve bubbles up her most relevant items and she is able to find the deck.
eDiscovery – Gets an email from legal department asking for all content (documents, conversations, emails) pertaining to one of her customers. She goes in to the eDiscovery center in Office 365 and queries for the related content. Exports all the results to the legal department.
Social – She loved the way her coworker presented the deck in the meeting and plans to give a shout out. Navigates to the Yammer tab in Office 365 and post a “Praise” for her coworker. Shares it with all company group.
Happy – Shuts down her devices and goes back home as a happy camper!
In future posts to this series, I will explain each of the above features in-depth.
