Roadmap – Martinus Consulting

Is it difficult to keep up with Office 365 continuous changes?

In my opinion it depends a few factors and it does not need to be difficult:

Your mindsets towards modern apps and cloud based working
Your willingness to do short periodically checkups
Allow users to have me time to get updated and do knowledge update

I would like today to pickup on some blogposts going around noting that Microsoft is releasing new features and apps in a high tempo creating a conflict for consultants, users, managers and admins to keep up.

So yes, this is confusing if you did not adapt your mindset, whatever role you have.

Working with Office 365 / SharePoint in the cloud is not different than working with a smartphone. Apps come and go, while updates popup like mushrooms on a sunny day after a good rain. And we decide Everytime what we like and use.

In both cases you have the choice which apps to use and which not. Realize that looking at Word or Excel, a lot of users use only a small percentage of the features, bells and whistles these programs have been offering since the beginning while others found themselves more features that enhance their productivity and use them to a greater extend. Office 365 works the same way. Only on a bit bigger scale.

Start seeing Office 365 as a whole, and find the apps that are useful for you and ignore the rest or wait till you are ready for them based on your needs.

Keep yourself informed on a weekly basis is the key here. You do not need to spend hours on this, just check what’s coming soon and is new and think about if this can improve your work of the of others

And then give it a try!

Office 365 is focussed more and more on self management. Users, managers and admins can all independently determine what works and what does not. So users should also get the chance to have personal time to update their knowledge and skills.

Try to be less rigid as an organisation and use best practice pilot initiatives to support further adoption. As I said, see Office 365 as a complete platform and as with Word itself, some users use this and some use that.

As admins we have to make the full organisations understand this are not rigid programs anymore with a single working method. This are platform solutions with freedom of work.

This does not take away the idea to streamline the general setup across an organisation and as admins we can still manage a lot of central setting. But do not block to easily everything new. Instead find early adopters and make them part of the target release program.

So check the admin portal at least once a week and find yourself those early adopters for early feedback.

Encourage users to search for work improvements what will benefit all.

For consultants to say, hold back on making manuals and PowerPoint presentations!

Keep the info focussed on the ideas and logic behind Office 365 and use more live demo examples to show what it is about. You indeed do not want to spend half your time updating your screenshots and adapting your text.

Hopes this helps any of you finding your way in going along with the updates flows of this modern times.

Is there a future for Yammer?

I like to share my thoughts today with you following up on a Collaboris Post with the title “Will Microsoft Teams replace Yammer?“.

I believe that with the rise of Microsoft Teams, Yammer will have a hard time to keep alive due to the social alternatives out there like the Facebooks and WeChats of this world.

Yammer had two usages before Teams was there: Social Platform and Team collaboration. The last aspect is now being replaced by Teams leaving only the social platform to be taken seriously.

In my experience, people like to keep work and private life separated on the app level. I see a lot of social interaction from global company users outside Office 365, with Facebook, WeChat and WhatsApp for example.

And if we consider the outer circle aspect in an organization then the modern communication/news and hub pages are taking over a lot of the global communication functionality.

In case you want as an organization to have your own social platform like Yammer where your employees interact on social bases you need to find an incentive that offers more than the other players already do.

Still, the challenge for me will be more when to use Yammer and not modern communication/news pages.

Yammer as an app is lacking a lot of features I think. It balances at the moment too much in between Teams (the real Team collaboration app) and a social platform.

Only if Microsoft really uplifts Yammer with a modern experience and functionality like its competitors it has a real chance.

The other reason Yammer might survive for the moment could be that big organizations do not like to switch their complete Yammer setup to Teams and will keep using Yammer as Team collaboration tool. I do not think this will last long though, thanks to the speedy development of Teams and all its beautiful options.

Let’s keep collaborating 🙂

Testing and go with the flow

In the Collaboris Collab365 Teams Guest Group someone came with the question how to test new releases beforehand and first deploy to a test environment before activating it on a production environment.

So here it comes. Your production/live environment = your test environment. (Unless you have 2 Office365 tenants and can use 1 solely for testing)

what does this mean?

Go with the flow is what it means to be in the cloud.

So I can not test beforehand? Yes you can!

Lets see what Microsoft says about it…

“A good practice is to leave majority of users in Standard release and IT Pros and power users in Targeted release to evaluate new features and prepare teams to support business users and executives.”

Release validation rings for Office 365.

( from Set up the Standard or Targeted release options in Office 365)

Your Target release candidates you setup via the Office Admin Center > Settings > Organization profile > Release preferences > Actions …

Set Release Track to “Targeted release for selected users”
Set your IT pros and Power users as desired

2018-02-13 20_27_49-Targeted release for selected users

Combine this with keeping yourself up to date about what changes are coming up.

“For significant updates, Office customers are initially notified by the Office 365 public roadmap. As an update gets closer to rolling out, it is communicated through your Office 365 Message Center.” (from Set up the Standard or Targeted release options in Office 365)

When a new function or app can be shut off/disabled and I conclude its really needed due to circumstances, I prep to do so as soon as the update gets to the world wide standard release stage. (happens seldom I do so)

Mostly I just make sure to know what is needed for the available setting options and I am able to explain the new functionality to the users/organization.

What makes life easier is..

Get the organization to understand the continuous update logic of cloud applications and let them embrace it for it provides constantly new features and options to improve the daily work.

Site Collections

For the Classic SharePoint environment you can opt for the creation of dedicated Site Collections for testing, as playground and special development.

Note: You will need to consider here how you are going to move all your development work to your live collections ones your are happy with the result. For me I learned I better directly build my ideas on the place to be and regulate the audience from testing to go live simply via the permission settings.

Another handy link: Stay on top of Office 365 changes

Stay tuned for the next update 😉