The other day, I was listening to the Microsoft 365 Voice podcast where they did an episode on collaborating in SharePoint vs. Teams and the language that consultants use to frame these decisions when talking to customers. It was a great episode, and the topic is certainly popping up a lot lately, but I feel that a lot of these kinds of conversations miss an opportunity to talk about (what feels like) a very different philosophy that’s driving Microsoft 365 and fostering new usage experiences that we don’t have a lot of precedent for.
To my mind, seeing Microsoft 365 evolve over the last decade or so, the strategy seems crystal clear – it’s not an either/or proposition. It’s about understanding that we don’t have to choose. It’s about context. Teams is just another entry point into our collective digital workplace where we’re constantly shifting between contexts.
We’re so accustomed to bucketizing our content and the tools that we use to create & access it, that it’s easy to miss what I believe is a foundation-level shift in concept.
It won’t matter where you put your information – or at least that’s no longer where the conversation needs to start.
Building these apps, servers, etc. has never been about the joy of storing information or dreaming up the most efficient way to categorize it… at least not directly. Under all of that is a very simple need that we’re all faced with – making effective & timely decisions. Everything from collaborating on documents that inform some downstream decision to building dashboards that enable at-a-glance decision making based on otherwise unrelated information, the 20 year history of SharePoint has been a story of trying to speed up these synapses.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot packed into that, but whether the decision is about little things or big things, sifting through the sea of information that’s swirling around us is now such an incredible undertaking that we’ll all drown if we keep trying to solve the problem using traditional approaches to information architecture and enterprise system design.
The “thing” going forward is examining & understanding context.
The information is what & where it is, but our individual contexts change rapidly throughout the day. With each change in context comes a slightly changed Rubik’s Cube of exactly what information and type of presentation is most efficient – in the super zoomed-in scenario that’s playing out at the time.
Browsing news on the intranet? Chatting with teammates? Walking into a meeting? Collaborating on a critical project? Meeting legislative or policy requirements? Disaster recovery scenario? All of these are fundamentally different activities, but they often rely upon the same information building blocks. Even then, its more than a simple need to understand what we’re doing and the data necessary to do it, we have to combine that with common user quirks & habits to help us determine what might be an intuitive next step for different people performing the same task. This forces our data to be sort of polymorphic from the outset, molding itself to use cases as they’re created and the contexts that we naturally arrive at.
There are plenty of straight forward examples of this, but the simplest case that I find myself using as an example is:
Photoshop(PSD) files
Personally, .PSD files had always been a challenge for me. We tend to generate a ton of them – whether for marketing material, product UI mockups, customer-facing infographics, etc., for me, there were always enough of them floating around that the need to centrally house them, along with the necessary metadata was obvious. Getting them into SharePoint would create the shared, accessible library that we’d want, but the second you wanted to take that next step – actually open a file in PhotoShop, the whole thing breaks down. Now you’re downloading files, making changes and re-uploading them. Worse yet, in a lot of cases, you had to do that just to see what the heck was even in a specific PSD.
In that moment, my need to find & access something was account for, but those same systems failed to account for the context that was in at the time – hurting my productivity overall. Even if you can convince an enterprise customer that this sort of thing is just an unpleasant tax as they try to make sure that their content is available to everyone that needs it, its inevitably going to fall apart when a few updates were made between re-uploads. Or, “I’ll just upload everything for this project once I’m done”, etc. Before long, your content is fragmented. Some are on your D:\ drive, some are in an old fileshare, some are in SharePoint and the only thing that anyone knows with certainty is that they don’t know where the most current content is.
Once you dissect how the strategy fell apart, you find that by accommodating the larger information architecture puzzles, you’ve placed enough hurdles in front of a user to ensure that your own strategy would fail.
If a user is forced to choose between the knowledge management goals of an org and their own personal productivity, they pick their own mission almost every time – even if they have good intentions.
Now, that idea is an relic of the past. Synchronization is (arguably for the first time) pretty bulletproof, allowing you to create the formal structures that you need in SharePoint and expose them via OneDrive as sync’d libraries directly to your users desktops. You can even pre-configure specific libraries to sync, providing a more traditional managed fileshare experience that doesn’t require users to press “weird” buttons. Project team spinning up that needs to work with the same image library?… it gets added into the Files tab of their Team, where they’re already working. Some people use SharePoint to find/filter/sort the files, access pages that provide additional guidance on branding, etc., others just open them up directly in Windows Explorer and use them – where they are and with the software that they need.
Its not one-size fits all. There are a lot more facets to think through now when designing these environments, but the potential impact on how effective we can all be at creating experiences that truly map to user needs is incredible.
This is what appears to be driving the overall digital workplace experience in Microsoft 365 – not one tool vs another, but a cohesive & expanding set of tools to help us make the most use out of the information that we have. Whether its SharePoint files surfaced in Teams, Teams meeting content surfacing in Windows explorer via OneDrive, Lists added as tabs where its data is most helpful to a team of people, or the clever way that graph data allows the slide deck you needed as you prepare for a meeting to magically appear in your office.com landing page EXACTLY when you thought to look for it – the game is different now.
Where Microsoft seems to be going is about creating experiences that add to & pull from our massive content repositories, effortlessly providing us with the info we need, when & where we need it, without relying up a user’s ability to memorize a navigation structure, remember search tricks or which app they were supposed to use.
Context is everything.