Everything You Need to Know About Office 365  – July 2019

Office 365 Hero

Have I mentioned that Teams is coming? I am going to keep reminding you all and myself and this article is going to beat you over the head with it. I apologize. After you finish reading about Teams you will also get to read about PowerApps Portals and Forms.

Microsoft Teams surpasses 13 million daily users

That is a lot and clearly buy the growth chart it is going to keep going for a while. We (I) used to think of SharePoint as the center of the Office 365 ecosystem. Not anymore. It is Teams, so get on board. And the best part of the article announcing this milestone? There is a little chart they don’t talk about it. And on that chart, you see that tool I don’t like Slack. It had a giant head start on Teams yet it got past up earlier this year. <evil laugh> I look for Slack and Teams to have an epic fight for a while, which is good because that means more features for us. Tony talked about one of the ways Slack Takes Aim at Teams Weaknesses last week.

Teams is the sales focus for fiscal 2020

Speaking of Brad and Teams. (Did they Team up?) He had an interesting quick note on Microsoft Shifts Sales Focus From Windows to Teams where he talks about instead of the sales force getting marching orders to push Windows this year it is Teams and the PBX features. Kind of fun. Guessing it is a way to grow that 19 million weekly active users and to increase revenues. Since their stock hit an all-time high in July this is probably a solid play to keep that going.

Also make sure to check out the other topics covered this month by Tony, such as emailing owners about obsolete Office 365 Groups and Teams.

Skype for Business Online is retiring in 2021 – party optional

In what I think is the last Teams tie in this month Microsoft announced that Skype Business Online is retiring July 31, 2021. That is two years people to transition so get going. This in no way is a surprise, they want us on that Teams thing and want to turn Skype off. Keep in mind this announcement is only for Online. If you are rocking Skype on-prem or Skype consumer there is no change. I also like in the announcement they mention that starting September 1 new O365 customers will be onboarded with Teams, not Skype. That is a change worth noting if you haven’t moved to the cloud yet. What are you waiting for?

PowerApps Portals go into public preview

A product near and dear to my heart gets some major new functionality. The ability to build a portal (think website) with PowerApps to interact with customers is pretty cool. The sites can be anonymous or authenticated and have the rich connections that PowerApps is none for. Surface SharePoint, Azure, Power BI, CDS, and more data. This is super exciting stuff as one of the big hang-ups of PowerApps has been they were only available in your tenant. Well, times are a changing. Go give this post a read and then build something awesome.

Microsoft Forms adds branching

Have you ever wanted to use Forms but were annoyed you couldn’t turn it into a dynamic pick a path adventure? I was. Now with the inclusion of branching, you can add logic. So your first question may be “Is Shane beautiful?” if they say Yes then the continue the standard questions. But, if they click No, then you can ask them questions about the problems with their eye site because clearly, they are site impaired. Read about this great addition and more in the Forms update.