Office 365 Collaboration: Sharepoint, Yammer, Lync and Skydrive Pro

There’s no doubt that most companies who choose Office 365 do so for the email capabilities and Microsoft Office rights. But especially if you’ve chosen an Enterprise plan, there are a lot of other features available. Here we look at some of the collaboration features included.

Sharepoint

Sharepoint is the web based site and collaboration platform which has been slowly evolving since being introduced by Microsoft in 2001.

When it’s been set up within an organisation, the great thing about Sharepoint is the speed and flexibility of creating team collaboration sites and the deep integration into other Microsoft products such as Office. The downside has always been the amount of initial and ongoing work to maintain a Sharepoint installation. Sharepoint Online, the cloud hosted version included with Office 365 Enterprise plans, takes away the maintenance pain while keeping most of the benefits that small to medium businesses will appreciate.

While Sharepoint Online can provide a public facing website if required (in fact one is set up for you by default), most users will want to explore the intranet and extranet collaboration sites. Creation of new sites is simple, being based on templates such as Team Site, Blog, Wiki and Document Center. Access control is reasonably straightforward and fine grained – it’s also possible to grant access to external users with Microsoft Online accounts. Document Libraries, Lists, Workflow and Search, the core organisation tools of any Sharepoint site, are available and fully featured. A library of Web Parts, the functional building blocks of Sharepoint sites, is available and it is possible to use some third party or custom web parts as well.

There are disadvantages compared to an on premises Sharepoint installation which may put off larger organisations – broadly relating to migration of existing sites, customisation and high end scaling. But these are not going to affect small to mid-sized organisations coming to Sharepoint for the first time.

Each Office 365 plan account is allocated 10Gb of storage plus 500Mb for each licensed user. Additional storage can be purchased on a per GB per month basis. There are some differences in Sharepoint features between E1 plans and E3/E4 plans which roughly equate to the difference between Sharepoint Standard and Sharepoint Enterprise. So if you’re looking for specific features, make sure you research availability or consult an Office 365 reseller such as IS People first.

Yammer

Yammer is a private social network that helps employees collaborate across departments, locations and business apps. You can use it as part of an internal communication strategy; to encourage communication within and between departments; or just to replace the water cooler (or more likely in the UK, kettle) as a place for informal interaction in companies with multiple sites and home working.

The Office 365 Enterprise plans all include a full Yammer subscription and there are web parts to embed Yammer feeds in your Sharepoint sites, so the departmental conversations can take place within the departmental team site for example.

Lync

Lync is Microsoft’s messaging client for businesses, previously known as Office Communicator. As with Sharepoint, an on premises installation of Lync Server requires considerable resources and skills, especially if you want to enable messaging from outside the company network. So bundling this with Office 365 is a boon for smaller companies.

As well as instant messaging, Lync provides real time presence information to other Microsoft products so you can see who’s online in Office and on Sharepoint sites for example. You can make voice and video calls to other Lync users, and host audio and video web conferences with generous participant limits as well as sharing your desktop for presentations.

Microsoft own Skype now, so Lync users can share presence, IM, and audio calling with Skype users who use a Microsoft ID to sign in. Video integration with Skype is planned for later this year.

Support for devices is good allowing Android, Windows Phone, iPhone and iPad users to participate as well as Windows and Mac users. As with other Microsoft online products, you can buy individual Lync Online subscriptions if you have users who don’t need mail or Office but do need to keep in touch.

Skydrive Pro

Skydrive Pro is the cloud file storage solution provided with Office 365. You can use it to ensure your private documents are available from all your devices, but you can also share those documents with other users to enable collaboration and team working. Integration with other Office products including Outlook is obviously very good.

Each Office 365 user is allocated 25GB of Skydrive Pro storage. This can be increased individually up to a maximum of 100GB by allocating storage from the same pool that Sharepoint uses.