Overview of Microsoft 365

Microsoft is the reigning leader in business collaboration and productivity. Over 400,000 companies worldwide use Microsoft products and services. Over 100 million monthly active users use SharePoint. Microsoft is a leader in the provision of content services platforms that focuses on the following key areas:

• Content management: A content management system (CMS) (also sometimes known as enterprise content management, or ECM) lets you store, manage, and optionally share an organization’s content, which includes documents and/or web pages. Microsoft’s first true CMS came with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, a product that later came to be known as SharePoint, which soon became a widely popular document and content management platform. While SharePoint serves as the document management solution for a team, OneDrive is meant to host and manage employees’ personal files.
• Collaboration: Collaboration is the exchange of information and ideas between collaborators within or even outside an organization. More recent advancements in technology allow for those collaborating to be located across different geographical locations and still be able to effectively work together as if they were collocated. SharePoint and Teams, coupled with your ever-favorite Office apps, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and so on, are a few of the Microsoft solutions that exist to help boost business collaboration.
• Communication: Communication is vital to every business. It reflects the culture of an organization and helps align the goals of individuals within an organization toward a common objective. To effectively communicate with employees, organizations should offer multiple channels for both formal and informal communication. Besides communicating the organization’s vision and goals, these channels can be used to update their employees on news, events, and policies to prepare them for a crucial situation, ensure safety, or effectively listen to the opinions and ideas of other employees. Microsoft has several apps that offer communication channels for different engagement levels, such as the following:
  • Outlook: For formal communication
  • Teams: For instant communication
  • Engage: For communication between interest groups
• Process automation: Business process automation is the use of technology to execute repeatable tasks or processes. It helps accelerate and standardize business processes, thereby improving the quality of the outcome while reducing costs at the same time. You can streamline both simple and complex processes, such as employee onboarding, accounts payable, contract management, time management, and more. Microsoft provides the following selection of apps, grouped under the Power Platform umbrella, to help you build business process automation apps. Power Platform lets experts in the subject build no-code business solutions using the following:
  • Power Apps: To build online forms
  • Power Automate: To automate repetitive processes
  • Power BI: To analyze and visualize data
  • Power Virtual Agents: To build chatbots
• Productivity: Besides the applications mentioned previously, there are several other applications that target specific use cases, which can be broadly divided into the following categories:
  • Office Online: Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to author and share content
  • Project and task management: Using To Do to manage personal tasks, Planner to manage simple project tasks, and Project Online for more complex scenarios
  • Digital forms: Using Power Apps and Forms to build forms and surveys
  • Video streaming: Using Stream to upload and manage videos
  • Copilot: Microsoft Copilot is the new transformative AI-driven tool that leverages the power of machine learning and natural language processing to optimize productivity, inspire creativity, and elevate collaboration within the Microsoft ecosystem. It simplifies tasks, offers intelligent suggestions, automates repetitive processes, and goes beyond being a mere tool. Designed for Microsoft products like Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Fabric, Sales, Service, and GitHub, Copilot empowers users in various domains.

All these products and services are now integrated and offered as a unified service called Microsoft 365 (earlier known as Microsoft Office 365 or Office 365). With Microsoft 365, Microsoft has designed a subscription model that allows organizations to provide these services to their employees. It comes with different plans tailored equally well for large, medium, and small companies.

In this chapter, we will first take a closer look at the infrastructure and evolution of Microsoft services. Then it will make sense to see the different plans and licensing models available to us. Once you’re aware of the licensing, we can learn a bit more about the apps and interfaces of Microsoft 365. Finally, at the end of this chapter, we will be ready to encounter the many recipes found in this cookbook.