Office 365 is getting more powerful by the day with a steady stream of new apps and features. But for many organizations, it’s proving to be too much of a good thing: All of these changes are causing user adoption problems.
When organizations adopt Office 365 they often aren’t sure how to leverage all the features they get with it, and users soon become confused. Part of the issue is that Office 365 gives you a collection of increasingly powerful tools, but those tools aren’t integrated right out of the box.
Your email and your calendar are in separate apps, for example. While Lync ties in reasonably well with your presence all over Office 365, now there’s a new video hub, and that hub is separate from the SharePoint sites. There’s also Office Groups, which almost seem like a manifestation of team sites, yet they have nothing to do with sites. And then there’s Yammer for social, but it’s actually not integrated with any aspect of SharePoint sites.
While it’s great that there’s so much happening with Office 365, users are having a hard time figuring out where to go for what and which tools to use.
People often have the expectation that Office 365’s features are integrated in a way that naturally supports user adoption, but that’s proving to not be the case. Now we’re finding that there’s an app menu in Office 365 and each of these different items are being treated as individual apps with slightly different user experiences.
What that means is organizations are going to have to do more than turn on all the features and tell users to dive in.
One solution is to architect the user experience, integrating different elements of the platform to meet the specific needs of your end users.
But the real key is around establishing governance, change management and user adoption strategies to ensure that a particular feature will be valuable to your workforce.
As Office 365’s capabilities grow, it reinforces the need for governance not just for SharePoint but all the different components in the productivity suite. To create a better user experience, you need to determine what makes sense to introduce to your user base, and explain to them how it fits into the organization and provides value.
That means defining the scenarios in which people should use OneDrive for Business as opposed to SharePoint sites, and also defining the organization’s content. Your governance needs to define what documents are records as well as what documents should be shared and used in collaboration.
When your company invests in technology as powerful as Office 365, you naturally want to take advantage of as much of it as possible to present value to the organization. But if you’re introducing too many features without a clear rationale, people aren’t going to adopt them. It’s too much of a good thing.
Before you roll out a tool like Yammer or Office Groups to your workforce, it’s important to question the role and responsibility of these components, and establish the context in which they work for the business.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by downloading our free white paper, “The Business Value Of Office 365 To The Enterprise”
