Which Collaboration Option is Best in Office 365?

We’ve been using Yammer here at BrightWork for a while now.  It has been a great tool for having open conversations and discussions.

But as we use Office 365 more and more (you can connect Office 365 and BrightWork by the way!), we are getting access to even more collaborative options.  We still use Yammer, but now there are Office 365 groups, SharePoint team sites of course, and Delve still to come, and probably some I’m missing.

But which collaboration tool should we be using?  How do you pick?

I don’t think you should or really even need to pick one winner.  What you have to keep in mind is that with these collaborative tools, each one has slightly different use cases.  In this blog I’m going to cover three that we utilize here at BrightWork, and how we use them to suit our different collaboration needs.

Yammer for conversations

We use Yammer for open conversations.  Sometimes this is about product updates, customer feedback, Microsoft news, maybe a summary of a new campaign that we’re launching in marketing. It’s great to have an open forum like that, where people can flesh out ideas, debate back and forth with input from everyone – and get those conversations out of email and into a place where everyone can participate and contribute.  So for us, Yammer is about ideas and conversations.

Office Groups for small group collaboration

Then we use Groups for small, basic team collaboration.  Maybe it’s a group for a department, or a team, or even a sub-set of people working on a particular project.  What’s great about groups is that they enable conversations, they have their own OneDrive for files storage and collaboration, a shared OneNote dedicated to that group.  It also includes a relatively new app called Planner, which is a simple card-based task list where you can bucket work into different categories like “To-Do,” “In-progress” and “Done”.  So Groups are great for small team who need to collaborate, but on the lighter side of a full blown SharePoint team site.

SharePoint Sites for more process and structure

Of course, some projects require more process and structure, so that’s where SharePoint sites come in.  You’ll need to plan and manage a project schedule, use a Work Breakdown Structure, manage goals, risks and issues, provide project status updates, and so on.  In this case, you might like to use a SharePoint team site where you can have that more structured approach to project management.  If you’re looking for a handy way to get started managing projects on SharePoint, BrightWork offerstwo free SharePoint project management templates to get you started.

Summary

So for us, there is no one tool that we rely on.  For different collaborative scenarios, we use the app that provides the team with the right amount of process for the task at hand.  We also use Skype for Business for instant messaging and screen sharing, OneDrive for Business to share files, etc.  So there is immense potential for collaboration and productivity gains among the many apps in Office 365.

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community