Navigating Through Microsoft’s Products

Microsoft was founded in 1975. That means they’ve been creating computer products for nearly 45 years, resulting in dozens of different products—many of which are still running across businesses today. With so many products in the market (and several that have considerable functional overlap), has created mass confusion as to what Microsoft is offering your business and which products are actually useful at your office.

Microsoft actually offers a full breadth of business applications that many people are either under-utilizing or not even using. There are so many different products your head might spin if we were to list every single one out.

As one of the major business tech companies out there, Microsoft has tried to answer a majority of your business needs, many of which seem to overlap. Because it’s really quite difficult to navigate Microsoft’s business product offerings, I wanted to help you walk through each of Microsoft’s current business offerings. Note: I am covering a lot of stuff today, if you have specific questions, feel free to reach out to us for a more in-depth conversation.

So, what are some of Microsoft’s products that might be useful for your business?

OneDrive—OneDrive is a cloud-storage and file sharing platform that allows your co-workers to collaborate with you on projects. OneDrive differs from Sharepoint in that OneDrive only provides storage and sharing. Sharepoint has additional collaborative features. In all, OneDrive is essentially an online folder system for file storage, whereas SharePoint includes many other features such as collaboration, CMS, and dashboards.

OneDrive for Business—OneDrive for Business is a OneDrive product that is managed by your organization, allowing you to collaborate on work documents with co-workers. In this case, site administrators have organizational control on what you can do within your OneDrive library.

SharePoint—SharePoint on the surface is a similar product to OneDrive (see above). It is a cloud-based document collaboration product. But unlike OneDrive, SharePoint provides extra collaboration features, including sites, workflows, lists and calendars. These tools are meant to make an individual’s collaborative efforts more organized and visible, with notifications and documents, automated tasks and calendar views. One quick note to all of you using Office 365—Office 365 now includes some of SharePoint’s features within the platform.

Teams—Teams is Microsoft’s chat platform for intracompany collaboration, including video conferencing. Microsoft has intended on Teams replacing Skype for Business (though Skype for Business is still another offering). Users can create separate threaded channels with different teams, allowing them to chat, call, or video chat. Teams can sync with other Office 365 products, which enables easier sharing of documents, videos and images. Microsoft Teams is more of a collaboration tool than Skype has to offer.

Flow—Flow allows your team to create automated workflows between your favorite/critical applications and services. By automating certain tasks (for instance, following anyone that hashtags your business on Twitter) your users can eliminate repetitive tasks in their day-to-day workflows.

Bottom line

There are a ton of Microsoft products for sale out there for businesses. While each may look individual and have specific utility for your business, many overlap in the functions and features they offer.