The course is part of this learning path
In this course, we take an introductory look at the productivity tools included within Microsoft 365. We go over the wide range of benefits each tool can provide and give examples of how and when to use each tool.
Learning Objectives
Have a greater understanding of each tool and be able to explain in detail what each tool can do and the situations in which it could be used.
Intended Audience
Users new to Microsoft 365.
Prerequisites
An understanding of general technical concepts.
Many of the tools within Microsoft 365 utilize either OneDrive or SharePoint as a service so I wanted to start here to give you a broad overview of each to help understand the tools going forward. OneDrive for Business and SharePoint are both different in terms of spectrum of what they cover however they work in a very similar way which is why I grouped them together for this lecture.
OneDrive for Business is a personal cloud storage solution for your files that allows for B2B file sharing and collaboration on those files with others. SharePoint is similar in that it does have a file management system however it has a much broader scope as it can be thought of as a “Group” cloud folder that has additional sharing permissions and security features. SharePoint also allows the creation of intranet sites which we will get to in a little bit.
The main feature of having a file saved in one of these solutions is the security and collaboration options it offers you and your organization. Let’s take a look at OneDrive for Business. If I share this file, I can specify the email of the exact person I would like to share this with. That person will then receive an email stating they were invited to the file and they can then access and edit that file based on the permissions I gave them when inviting them. SharePoint on the other hand goes a step further than that.
Yes, you can directly invite individuals to a file or an entire folder, but you can also do so based on a user role from that specific SharePoint site. For example, I could have any member of this SharePoint site have viewing access to this file, however, I only want a few people to have editing privileges. So, I would simply ensure members have viewing privileges and add the individual users with editing privileges. I could also add this file to the main page of the SharePoint site so anyone accessing the site will see it and be updated with the latest information.
Now, both OneDrive and SharePoint allow for real-time collaboration with something called co-authoring which allows multiple users to be editing the same document at the same time. This coupled with a the video conferencing in teams can be incredibly powerful collaborating on a project, but we will cover that a bit later. Now that we have a better understanding of what OneDrive and SharePoint are, the original Microsoft Office to showcase just how much has changed.
Lee has spent most of his professional career learning as much as he could about PC hardware and software while working as a PC technician with Microsoft. Once covid hit, he moved into a customer training role with the goal to get as many people prepared for remote work as possible using Microsoft 365. Being both Microsoft 365 certified and a self-proclaimed Microsoft Teams expert, Lee continues to expand his knowledge by working through the wide range of Microsoft certifications.