Part 4 of 7
Online Resources to Discover and Learn about Office 365
Deeper Dive
Should I save my documents to OneDrive for Business or a SharePoint Team site?
Office 365 is a suite of tools, aka apps. Understanding the purpose of each tool from the outset can help immensely when deciding on the tool for the job. This question is an ideal example. It can be tempting to save everything to one or the other. However, it is worth considering who needs access to the content you are creating.
Save to OneDrive for Business when; you need a central location to store and access your documents from any location, you don’t plan to share a document, you might share but only infrequently or for short periods, or no existing team site is relevant. Sometimes a document in OneDrive for Business becomes team relevant, at which point it would make sense to move it to a team site.
If the content is for team collaboration then saving to a Team site is a better choice, as it enables multiple individuals and teams to work on documents and content at the same time with two-way communication among team members along with other features to enable effective collaboration. For example; spreading ownership of content, granting permissions to a team site structure rather than individual documents and creating workflow to enable assignment of content to team members.
Common features
Skype for Business Online
Skype for Business (formerly known as Microsoft Lync) is an instant, text, voice and video messaging client. The addition of ‘Online’ to its title denotes that it is part of Office 365. Skype for Business is enterprise software and, compared to Skype, has different features that target businesses. It’s basic features, as you might expect are; instant messaging, Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing. Advanced features focus on collaboration and integration with other Microsoft software including;
- Real-time screen-sharing with colleagues during meetings, either 1:1 or 1:many.
- File sharing.
- Presence information within applications, such as Outlook, so you can see if contacts are online/offline.
- Real-time collaboration information, so you can see if colleagues are actively editing shared documents.
- Advanced integration with outlook and 3rd party conference services, to allow you to integrate audio conference bridges with your skype meetings. This allows anyone, via phone or PC Headset, to connect into your Skype meetings.
Links to the Skype for Business Help Centre and main page
OneNote
OneNote is a digital notebook. Office 365 users will, in keeping with Microsoft’s ethos of collaboration and integration, benefit from being able to include and access content from across Office 365 apps. OneNote is based on the idea of a Notebook with Sections and pages.
With OneNote, you can; type notes or record audio at your laptop, sketch or write ideas on a tablet, add pictures from a smartphone, find notes instantly, freely move notes around the page, organise those pages into sections, keep sections in one or more notebooks, switch devices and pick up right where you left off, share notebooks with others so Teams can all view and contribute at the same time. The ability to switch devices has been of great use to me as it means I can capture notes and ideas in OneNote on my phone and find them immediately in OneNote on my Office based PC.
Many of the Office 365 apps have a ‘Send To OneNote’, Print to OneNote or a ‘Linked Notes’ button, which enables fast efficient transfer of content. In OneNote tag or mark an item for follow-up and it will appear in your Outlook Tasks for easy tracking and action.
Microsoft’s Office blog contains a useful page explaining OneNote and the site for OneNote contains links and video
- https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Introducing-OneNote-38be036d-5b5a-49ad-83be-292fe53ad7b3
- https://www.onenote.com
- https://support.office.com/en-gb/onenote
When OneNote is installed a specific Notebook called ‘OneNote Guide’ is created with sections on; getting started, tips and many features to get you started.
Continues…/part 5 – Microsoft Teams
For more information about migrating to Microsoft Office 365, click here.
