Connecting your Microsoft Office 365 workloads can help you work more effectively and boost your productivity. In Office 365, a workload is a term that Microsoft uses to describe packaged sets of features that were once separate. Over time, Microsoft is gradually blending its workloads to provide a more integrated work experience.
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Examples of Office 365 Workloads
The simplest example of an Office 365 workload is the email and calendar workload. Traditionally, these services were provided on-premises by Microsoft Exchange, but after these features moved online, Microsoft gradually dropped the Exchange name and called this workload simply “Email and Calendar.”
Another example of a workload is the combination of instant messaging, video calling and direct voice calling. These features are packaged together into Skype for Business.
Cloud-based personal file management, in the form of OneDrive, is an important workload for many businesses. Other services, such as Dropbox, are available. If you use more than one file management system, it’s important to connect them to provide continuity in your workflows.
Both Yammer and Office Groups provide social collaboration. This is an example of two separate approaches to achieving the same goal. In the future, Microsoft may choose to merge these workloads to create a single cohesive social collaboration platform.
SharePoint is a workload that provides document collaboration and intranet services. For many businesses, this is the most important workload they use. SharePoint already integrates many other workloads, including Office 365 Video, content and people discovery tools, Microsoft Flow, Power BI and Office Planner.
How to Seamlessly Connect Workloads
Over the next 12 to 18 months (sometime in 2017), Microsoft is expected to provide better connections between currently disparate workloads. In the meantime, you need to consider how to integrate different workloads into your intranet, which is the hub of any digital workspace. Seamlessly integrating workloads can improve the workflow of your users, increasing the overall productivity of your business.
Where Should You Start?
For many businesses, the most urgent need is to allow people working in teams to have group conversations, rather than having them rely on old-fashioned email threading to communicate. If you’re using Yammer, you can embed these conversations into your team site. Alternatively, Office Groups can facilitate these conversations.
Microsoft is expected to integrate these two workloads by the end of this year. In the meantime, whether you use Office Groups or Yammer, you need to consider the security and accessibility of your teams’ conversations.
If you want to go further, consider integrating other workloads into your company intranet. For example, Delve, a tool for content and people discovery that is powered by Microsoft Graph should be integrated into your digital workspace so that employees can quickly look up the information they need from within the platform they are already using, rather than having to open a separate tool. Similarly, when employees need to fill out a form as part of their job, the form they need should be immediately available to fill out within the intranet system so they don’t waste time looking for it.
Final Thought
Seamlessly connecting Office 365 workloads can help to simplify the user experience for your workers – which is of particular importance given that the current Office 365 user experience is somewhat fractured across different apps.
When your employees need to use multiple tools daily, these tools must be integrated to closely fit the way that users work. Seamlessly integrating different workloads into your intranet can reduce the amount of time your users spend switching between separate tools and platforms, which could help them work more efficiently.
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