Over the two years we have been pushing Office 365 to customers as either an upgrade to existing Exchange servers or other mail systems, Microsoft have continued to improve and add features to this service.
Today’s article is to highlight the use and understanding of a couple of these as over the years they have also changed causing confusion. These services in particular Skype for Business, SharePoint and Yammer have not only changed over the years but certain features cross over between them.
Skype for Business
Over the years there have been many point-to-point communication tools from MSN Messenger, Skype and Whatsapp. Skype for Business is Microsoft’s revamped version of Lync which is an in-build communication tool accessible on desktops, mobiles and web browsers providing presence (online, available, in a meeting, away…) and communication via VoIP and chat messages.
Skype is also very powerful in the fact it also offers meetings with third parties allowing you to share files, voice and other tools without the other meeting members having an Office 365 subscription.
SharePoint
Microsoft’s collaboration platform based on formal structures to provide access to content for the business or allow the business to create focus teams to work on projects or as a department.
SharePoint is extremely powerful allowing you to customise it to your needs with document libraries, calendars, surveys, tasks and more to each team. Something that puts people off from using SharePoint is the fact that it is web based; but Microsoft have an answer to that as well!
OneDrive for Business allows a user to synchronise their accessible document libraries from their teams to a computer in the same manner that Dropbox and similar products do. This gives you a standard interface to your files allowing normal desktop applications to interact with your files with ease. (Do not get OneDrive for Business mixed up with OneDrive as this is similar but for a personal set of files only)
Yammer
Yammer is a recent addition to the Office 365 family taking many features from SharePoint and provides companies with their own internal Social Networking site similar to Facebook.
This service is great for group chats / discussions and an internal bulletin board.
Due to the abilities to share and upload files this crosses with SharePoint, and it also crosses a little with Skype for Business as it also provides a presence feature.