Chapter 8
Unlocking Enhanced Collaboration
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding machine learning and artificial intelligence in Microsoft 365
Finding content with Delve
Social networking at work with SharePoint and Yammer
A day in the life of an IT admin is typically focused on keeping everyone in the organization productive. From resetting passwords to resolving printer issues to fixing “broken” computers, IT admins are the underappreciated, forgettable team member in the workplace. In fact, there is no shortage of funny videos on the Internet about IT admins. Although some of these videos exaggerate, they have a common theme related to the stereotypical perception of an IT admin: nerdy, geeky, condescending, socially awkward, and usually a guy.
The reality in today’s world, however, is that we all depend on our IT admins to get our jobs done. In their own way, they wield huge power that could make a difference in an organization’s quest to realize its goals. Can you imagine what it would be like if there were no IT admin to help a marketing executive print a file to a network printer? Or think of the repercussions if there were no one to remotely wipe a CEO’s lost laptop or mobile device. Business life without an IT admin would be catastrophic!
It’s hard to find a company nowadays that does not use technology in some way to deliver its products or services, and the shared understanding is that every company is a technology company. The tide has shifted for the IT admin who has been the butt of jokes over the past several decades. TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory or The IT Crowd have helped make the geek culture mainstream and raised the profiles of these back-office geniuses. It has also made pursuing a career in IT desirable for women as well as men.
The timesaving collaboration features in Microsoft 365 Business are another opportunity for an IT admin to elevate the status of his or her field. Never mind that artificial intelligence and machine learning are already built into the solution; IT admins can still impart knowledge to their users as if they did all the complex programming and configuration.
In this chapter, you explore the advanced technologies that underpin the collaboration features in Microsoft 365 Business. You see these features come alive as you step through productivity scenarios using the collaboration toolkit in the solution. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have learned so many cool things about the technology that you might just end up the office hero.
Understanding the Advanced Technologies in the Solution
Our world is exploding in data. From selfies on our mobile devices, to the number of steps recorded on our Fitbits, to the rants we post on Facebook, and all the way to the logs our Internet of Things (IoT) devices send to the cloud, data is everywhere.
The same is true in our workplace. We have emails, meeting notes, chats, presentations, and more. The challenge we face with this massive amount of data is finding the one bit of information we need at the right moment. Studies have shown that a big part of productivity loss in the workplace is looking for and not finding data.
The advanced technologies in Microsoft 365 Business are designed to solve this challenge. In this section, you learn more about the built-in artificial intelligence and machine learning that happens in the background to make collaboration a much better experience in Microsoft 365 Business.
All together as one with Groups
Office 365 Groups (or Groups for short) is a service in Microsoft 365 Business that enables end users to be part of a membership service. Those memberships then serve as the basis for access to the rest of the services in the solution. For example, suppose a marketing team has ten members. An IT admin can create a group called Marketing Team and use that group to grant access to company resources such as files and folders in SharePoint, device management in Intune, and more. This approach saves the IT admin time from having to enter ten users one at a time to all the different services in Microsoft 365.
Groups is the secret sauce for seamless collaboration because it provides a single identity for teams working together, whether in SharePoint Online, Office Apps, Yammer, or Microsoft Teams. In addition to its end user collaboration benefits, Groups is an important tool for IT admins when managing identities and devices.
Groups can be either private or public. In a private group, content can be accessed by only members of the group. Anyone wanting to join a private group will need to be approved by the group owner. In a public group, anyone in the organization can access the content of the group. Anyone can also join the group without needing group owner approval.
By default, Groups is enabled for external sharing, so a group member can invite people outside the organization to access and join the group. If you want to disable this feature, you must have global admin privileges for your Microsoft 365 tenant.
To disable external sharing for Groups, follow these steps:
- Navigate to
https://admin.microsoft.com/ -
In the left pane, under Settings, select Services & Add-Ins.
The Services & Add-Ins page appears.
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Scroll down and select Office 365 Group.
The Office 365 Groups settings form appears on the right.
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Next to Let Group Members outside the Organization Access Group Content, toggle the switch to the off position, as shown in Figure 8-1.
This action also turns off the settings for Let Group Owners Add People outside the Organization to Groups.
- Click the Save button to save your changes.
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Click the Close button to close the form.
You return to the Services & Add-Ins page.
FIGURE 8-1: Turning off external sharing for Groups.
Depending on how you plan to use Groups, you can create them in a few places. If you want to collaborate with others with a shared calendar and email, Outlook Online is an ideal place to create Groups. Simply click the new icon (+ sign) next to Groups, as shown at the bottom of Figure 8-2, and follow the prompts in the form that pops up.
FIGURE 8-2: Creating a Group from Outlook Online.
If you’re aiming for a broader audience reach, such as company-wide communications, Yammer is a great place to create a Group. While logged in to Yammer, click the + Create a Group link (see Figure 8-3) in the left pane and then follow the prompts.
FIGURE 8-3: Creating a Group from Yammer.
For a robust team collaboration with all the bells and whistles that come with team sites in SharePoint, you can create a Group at the same time you create a new SharePoint team site.
And last but not least, if you want to have a chat-based collaboration workspace, you can create a Group from Microsoft Teams. I cover Teams in Chapter 9.
Connecting the dots with Office Graph
It may seem a bit like Big Brother, but all your interactions and behaviors in Microsoft 365 Business are captured, analyzed, and processed by machine-learning algorithms that are then fed into artificial intelligence experiences so that relevant information can be made available to you without lifting a finger. For example, if you send and receive a lot of emails from a colleague named John, meet with him regularly on Microsoft Teams, or share documents with him on OneDrive for Business, the system determines that your connection with John is very high. As a result, the system will let know what John is up to by displaying information such as the last document he worked on or articles he’s published in SharePoint — granted, of course, that you have access to those documents.
The technology that makes all this magic happen is called Office Graph. It runs in the background and there is no need to configure it. Office Graph automatically maps your connections with people in your organization so you can discover relevant content and save time by prioritizing your focus.
Serving up content with Delve
One of the best ways to see Office Graph in action is through Delve. The more you interact with others in Microsoft 365 Business, and the more signals Office Graph has collected from those interactions, the richer the information in Delve becomes.
Delve is a page in Microsoft 365 Business that is available to all licensed users. Each Delve page (see Figure 8-4) is different from one user to another and shows the most relevant content for a user based on the user’s interactions as captured by Office Graph.
FIGURE 8-4: Delve surfaces relevant content based on Office Graph.
The top section of Delve, to the right of your profile summary, displays the documents you were working on last. I find this section helpful because I may have several documents open throughout the day. When I shut down my laptop to go to a meeting or start my commute, I close all open documents. When I’m back at my desk to start working again, it takes me a few minutes to remember what documents I had previously open. With Delve, I can see those documents and just pick up where I left off. Note, too, that the card for the document gives you tidbits of information, such as how many people viewed it.
If you haven’t yet checked out Pinterest, please do. I’m seeing more apps taking inspiration from the way Pinterest displays information in a board. For example, Delve has a nifty feature that allows you to create a board similar to the ones on Pinterest. This feature is helpful when you want to organize documents into meaningful categories. I often find myself hunting for documents because they’re saved in a folder that is meaningful only to the person who saved it.
Delve has a lot more to discover, so I encourage you to spend some time browsing around and clicking icons and buttons to see what they do.
Getting to Know Your Collaboration Toolkit
As individuals and as teams, we all work differently and therefore have different collaboration needs. In Microsoft 365 Business, we are not stuck with one cookie-cutter approach for teamwork. In this section, I touch on just two of the most commonly used services. After you gain an understanding of their capabilities, you should find it easy to learn how to use the rest of the collaboration tools in the solution. I don’t cover Microsoft Teams in this section because a separate chapter, Chapter 9, is dedicated to the topic.
Creating a team site in SharePoint
Sometimes a shared calendar and mailbox is not enough to meet a team’s collaboration needs. For example, you may be working on a project where you need a project schedule, or granular access permissions, or workflows to automate your team’s work. In those situations, the answer to your collaboration needs is a SharePoint team site.
Creating a team site in SharePoint is easy. Here’s how:
- Log in to the Office 365 portal at
https://portal.office.com. - In the list of apps, click the SharePoint app icon.
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On the SharePoint page, click the + Create Site button, as shown in Figure 8-5.
The Create a Site form appears on the right.
- Select Team Site.
- In the form that appears to the right, complete the required information, as shown in Figure 8-6.
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Click Next.
The Add Group Members form appears.
- In the box under Add Additional Owners, add a backup owner for the team site.
- In the box below Add Members, add members to the site by adding their names.
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Click Finish.
The form disappears and the home page for the new SharePoint site is displayed.
FIGURE 8-5: The + Create Site button in SharePoint.
FIGURE 8-6: Creating a team site in SharePoint.
From the landing page of the new SharePoint site, note on the top right the row of people icons representing the members of your site who are also members of your Office 365 Group.
Being social at work with Yammer
Yammer is similar to Facebook at work but better — professional without the annoying ads. It’s a great solution for crowdsourcing ideas and connecting with everyone in the organization. You can create topics of interest, use hashtags and @mentions, and even collaborate with people outside your organizations.
In Yammer, you post updates, which can include giphys (images looped into a short video with no sound), files from SharePoint or Yammer itself, or a file from your computer, as shown in Figure 8-7.
FIGURE 8-7: Posting an update in Yammer.
If you really want to get into it, you can also conduct a poll, send someone a Praise or kudos, and broadcast an announcement to the entire organization (see Figure 8-8).
FIGURE 8-8: Send a Praise through Yammer.
Yammer is best for onboarding new employees or a new team member. I once program-managed a global technology implementation project that went on for over a year. During the project, new team members from other countries would join the project. I saved a lot of time onboarding new team members by simply adding them to the Yammer group and encouraging them to read past posts and discussions to get up to speed.