Pait Group Blog

Deployed and Depressed- When your M365 Intranet Isn’t Working For You

We at Pait Group have been using our DPS (or Deployment Planning Services) to help customers create new, modern intranets for many years. Most of the time, our clients are migrating from an old version of SharePoint. Sometimes they are migrating from a different platform. And sometimes they are setting up their very first intranet ever and finally moving away from putting everything in a file share! 

So what happens when a client comes to us and none of these scenarios are true? What if they have Microsoft 365 already, they’ve even deployed a modern intranet in SharePoint Online, they are already using Microsoft Teams, etc.? What then?

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Finally! Doc Libraries Get Treated Like the Lists that They Are...

My relationship with SharePoint goes way back to the SPS 2003 days. Let’s just say if SharePoint and I had a kid together, the kid would be able to move out and vote by now.

And since the beginning of my time with SharePoint, I always understood a document library to be a “special” kind of SharePoint list, one where each item just so happens to be a file. Sure, there are other differences between libraries and lists, but they all have columns and rows and views (and dreaded list view thresholds!) and content types and version history, etc. They are much more alike than they are different! 

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Why Is Anyone Talking About Yammer When We Have (and Love!) Teams?

Editor's Note: "Yammer" is now known as "Viva Engage"

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 and made it available for their Office 365 customers the following year. Early in 2016, Microsoft rolled out Yammer to their Office 365 commercial customers as “on” by default.  

At the time, I was an intranet manager at an association and decided to go along with Microsoft’s “on by default” rollout of Yammer. Why stop it? I started with a pilot for a few weeks to test it out, and then I opened things up to all staff. I got lots of folks interested in using it, but many wanted “private” groups for their teams to collaborate and communicate. They also heavily used the “private messaging” option in Yammer. They contributed to the public groups for sure, and enjoyed engaging across the org, but they really were craving some “private” options. 

Imagine the confusion, then, when this “Teams” thing was suddenly all the buzz coming from Microsoft just a year later. Group spaces for people to communicate and post files? Check! “Chat” that seemed a lot like “private messaging”? Check! Option to subscribe and get email notifications for missed activity? Check! Plus, the interface was just so appealing, the chat was a much better experience than the “private messaging” in Yammer, and there were so many additional features in Teams.

Why the heck would we still use Yammer now that we have this new shiny Teams toy? 

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