Guide for the introduction of Microsoft 365, Teams and Sharepoint
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The recent past has shown that the change to contemporary working models such as mobile working and home office can succeed very well for many areas. In many cases, it is even the case that employees not only accept and embrace the new ways of working, but that they also want to continue working flexibly and location-independently in the future, at least to some extent. Be it to better organize childcare or doctor's appointments more efficiently, or simply to save commuting to work a few days a week: Working from the comfort of your own home has its undeniable advantages. Those who can claim these advantages are automatically more satisfied, and satisfied employees are known to be sick less often and more loyal to their employer.
The prerequisite for this is, of course, that employees are equipped with the appropriate work tools. In addition to the hardware, this of course also includes the right tools so that employees can, on the one hand, work on their own tasks from anywhere and, on the other hand, also effectively exchange information with their colleagues. Meetings, information events, announcements, reviews, feedback, presentations, agreements, inquiries - all these small and larger interactions that take place in the office every day must find their place in the digital world.
There are a whole range of applications for each of these tasks, and companies are initially faced with the difficult task of selecting the right ones for their processes and requirements. With Microsoft 365, Teams and SharePoint, Microsoft offers a whole bundle of complementary technologies with which companies can not only cover all tasks, but also integrate them neatly into an interlocking digital ecosystem. This guide shows you what you need to consider when introducing the three areas.
Microsoft 365 includes a whole range of Office applications and cloud services such as Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote. Users benefit from the unlimited availability of their files as well as from constant optimizations of the applications themselves, which can positively influence their own work processes. The spreadsheet application Excel, for example, now offers a function that allows users to upload a photo of a table and the program then automatically converts it into an editable table - this eliminates the need to manually type in the data and the table can be used immediately for the user's own purposes.
First of all, it is a matter of knowing your own requirements precisely and deciding on this basis which of the productivity applications are relevant at all. All Office applications can be booked individually or used as a bundle in the following four business plans:
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic |
Microsoft 365 Apps for Business |
Microsoft 365 Business Standard |
Microsoft 365 Business Premium |
| 5,10 € user/month | 8,80 € user/month | 10,50 € user/month | 18,60 € user/month |
Table: Overview of available plans and costs according to Microsoft website
The following three questions will help you choose the right plan:
Email hosting with your own domain names is included in the Business Basic, Business Standard, and Business Premium plans - but not in the Apps for Business plan.
You have access to the Office applications online in each of the four plans. However, downloadable desktop apps that are also available to you offline are not available in the Business Basic plan.
Especially if you work with sensitive information, additional security features such as cloud archiving of emails for long-term storage and Advanced Threat Protection features such as Microsoft Defender for protection against ransomware might be of interest to you. These are available exclusively in the Business Premium plan.
Once you have chosen the right Microsoft 365 Business plan, you can book it via the Microsoft website and, after activating your account, use or download the corresponding Office applications.
In the admin area of your account, you can also add active users, create email addresses and aliases, reset and assign passwords, and remove users. You can also manage your licenses and payment methods at any time.
If you have added new active users, they can log in with the created password, start or download the Office applications and also change their password if necessary.
Microsoft Teams has proven to be an effective collaboration tool in many companies. It combines online meetings with chat functions and cloud storage for shared documents as well as project management functions. Microsoft Teams thus not only supports remote work, but also connects different departments and company locations with each other.
In addition, many other apps can be seamlessly integrated into Microsoft and used directly in the application. Of course, all other Office applications in particular are integrated into Microsoft Team, so that work processes such as setting up online conferences are already optimized.
The main collaboration features are chat, online meetings, teams and channels.
Teams make it easy for colleagues to communicate with each other - either individually in 1-to-1 chats, in group chats, or in meeting chats. Other users can be added to the chat at any time, addressed directly in the chat, and important chats can be pinned at the top of the application bar. It's also possible to send documents, GIFs, and emoticons, making each conversation more personal.
For collaboration with external or remote colleagues, there is the option to organize Teams meetings directly in the Teams calendar or via Microsoft Outlook and invite other users to join. Participants can raise their hands digitally when asked questions without disrupting a presentation, share their screen, and send responses with emoticons. It's even possible to join Teams meetings over the phone when a stable Internet connection is not available.
Teams and channels within Microsoft Teams help to organize, structure and intelligently bundle information, user groups and processes. Teams can be used, for example, to map organizational units, projects and departments. Underneath, various channels can be created in which teams can collaborate, chat, schedule meetings, share documents, and distribute and track tasks.
In addition to the native features that Microsoft already brings to the table, the Office application offers an app marketplace that allows users to access thousands of additional apps and integrate them directly into their Teams application. This allows workflows and organizational and/or creative collaboration to be optimized even further.
Whether it's project management tools like Jira, notebooks like OneNote, or whiteboard solutions like Miro, no matter what your work processes look like, Microsoft Teams lets you intelligently assemble your workflows while engaging relevant internal as well as external stakeholders.
While Microsoft Teams primarily promotes collaboration among larger and smaller teams within the organization through communication and project management features, Microsoft SharePoint gives companies the ability to develop a central intranet for the entire organization and create team websites for collaboration.
This makes SharePoint the right place to make documents, work materials, documentation and company news available centrally and to make them easy to find with the help of intelligent search functions.
SharePoint is a classic intranet in which a separate website can be created for each business unit or project. Users can follow individual websites, read news and search and filter a wide variety of content.
The focus of Microsoft SharePoint is on document management. Users can open documents in the browser or in the app and also share them with colleagues via links or Outlook.
Users can easily create websites themselves. In Microsoft SharePoint, a distinction is made between team websites, to create a private area for collaboration within a specific team, and communication websites, which involve a broader audience. These web pages can be named and described so that users can quickly understand the context of the content.
In the second step, document libraries can be created and filter options can be set. Within the website, different pages can be created and filled with images, text and other content.
Many companies are wondering whether they should choose Microsoft SharePoint or Teams to support location-independent collaboration in the organization. To answer this question, the requirements of the individual teams must be recorded and compared with the core functions of the two Office applications.
In general, it can be said that the focus of Microsoft Teams is rather on the direct communication of project teams and departments. For this purpose, the application offers numerous functions such as online meetings and chats. The central function of Microsoft SharePoint, on the other hand, is document management and the company-wide display of news and announcements.
To ensure that companies continue to use the right tools in the future, new business processes, departments and locations must be incorporated into the application landscape at an early stage. It is important to continuously evaluate the existing office apps in terms of their use and their contribution to the efficiency of communication and processes. Only in this way can the application inventory and app structures and processes be continuously optimized and adapted to changing requirements.
In this way, redundant documents can also be avoided, for example, and a central information base can be realized for everyone. To ensure that this can be planned, managed and controlled within the organization, it makes sense to centralize the task of monitoring and adapting Office applications. The individual departments and teams, in turn, have the option in both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint to set up their own environments that support their individual processes and workflows.