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I'm working with a client right now, trying to onboard them to O365 - I tried to push them the GSuite way (I prefer it, they prefer it, but their IT company is
by dmje 4y ago
I'm working with a client right now, trying to onboard them to O365 - I tried to push them the GSuite way (I prefer it, they prefer it, but their IT company is fixed on O365 and...other reasons) - so have been spending lots of time working with O365 from a top-down perspective.
Individually, things like MS Word / Excel work really brilliantly in the browser and as a cloud suite. But put them together and it's an absolutely clusterf*k.
The list of "apps" is absolutely enormous - and there is no coherent route between them, or consistency in operation. It looks like exactly what it is - a huge, overarching and insanely rich company just simply bought All The Things, slapped a bit of branding and a font on everything and then popped all the icons onto the same page. There's zero consistency, zero sense of how these things should be used together, zero explanation as to why you'd choose (say) Yammer over Teams, "Bookings" over Outlook calendars, or "Viva" over Sharepoint. The documentation is awful - again, not individually - sometimes this is ok - but the overall "this is the suite you're buying into, and here's how to use it" strategic overview. In fact it isn't awful, it's just simply non-existent.
This is before you even get to the absolute horribleness of the logging in / logging out / multiple windows opening / redirection hell user experience.
And then - layer on Teams on top of this - it is absolutely opaque about whether Teams is trying to be a sort of "glue" for all of the above (it fails) or a replacement (it fails) or a standalone thing (it mostly fails). There's a sort of half-assed attempt to make bits of Teams sort of work with bits of Sharepoint, but no, actually it turns out it doesn't, quite...
It's just such a weird thing. As I say, the individual experiences are sometimes quite good - Word is really excellent in-browser for example - but the overall piece is just absolutely insane. I'm slightly at a loss as to how to onboard and train organisations with few IT skills when a veteran like me (20+ years in the business) is absolutely baffled by it.