We want our users to adopt Office 365. To make it their own, so that they can reap its benefits. But they can only adopt it successfully, if some prerequisites are fulfilled. Let us discuss three of them, which I have recently been addressing in a project.
These are not new; they fit into the barriers to a successful adoption I already talked about in 2012. But they still need to be taken care of.
1. Office 365 needs to be easily accessible
Many components of Office 365 live online, in the browser. So:
- All users should have a working Office 365 account
- There should be a clear entry point.
If you have a SharePoint intranet in the same Office 365 environment, you are all set. Just explain where they can access the different Office 365 apps, in particular the App Launcher (the “waffle”).
At my client, we still have an old intranet, in an old version of SharePoint. So we need to add an obvious link leading the users to Office 365. Because now they don’t know how to get there…
2. It has to work
Ok, this is really obvious and sounds trite. But unfortunately it is not as easily accomplished. We hit some snags in practice… Computer savvy users can handle it, but the innocent end-users need a seamless experience.
- Every Office 365 component has to work properly before you introduce it to the audience at large.
For example, we’ve had issues with the installation of Office 2016, that came as a part of Office 365, next to Office 2010. That causes weird issues, so we must get rid of Office 2010 on every laptop before we can wholeheartedly promote Office 365.
And many Office 365 profiles are incorrect, because the information in Active Directory is outdated. So we need to clean up Active Directory and only then will the profiles and the people search make sense. - Every third party add-on that you promote has to work properly
Part of our user group has harmon.ie to connect Outlook to SharePoint. However, there have been issues with it since we switched from Office 2010 to 2016. We need to fix them, before we can roll it out to the rest
3. We need to get our story straight, given the dependencies and developments
So what is the story at this time? What should the employees use and how, to get their jobs done?
- Currently, we are still working on project site templates in SharePoint Online. So we have to align our adoption efforts for SharePoint with the development of the new site templates: either wait until we have the project template for the business unit or introduce the department sites and explain what will follow.
- We have just migrated the project sites from SharePoint 2007 and 2013. After this summer the intranet will be migrated. And we are formulating a plan to migrate the “home drive” fileshares to OneDrive for Business. So we need to align our story with the migration projects.
- Most users still have Windows 7 and the official browser still is Internet Explorer 11. So we still have the “old” OneDrive syncing mechanism that takes up space on your laptop. And Modern SharePoint does not run smoothly at all for the innocent users.
- We are transitioning from Windows 7 to Windows 10. For Windows 10, Microsoft recommends the new OneNote for Windows 10 app instead of the client we are using in Windows 7.
- We are still on Skype for Business. which will be replaced by Microsoft Teams. The tool is too useful for online consultation to wait until we have switched to Teams. So we will start with rolling out Skype for Business, explaining that the basics will the same in Teams later.
- We will roll out Microsoft Teams as a hub for informal collaboration soon. But we need to get our story straight first: what will be used it for, what are the best practices, how do we set up proper governance.
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Trackback by http://Bannondang.Ac.th/NG/index.php?name=webboard&file=read&id=11438 — August 8, 2023 @ 05:35