How Azure AD Premium & Office 365 improves Collaboration

So you’ve always wondered what it takes to improve both collaboration and business processes in your organization, which results in employees being more productive? Do I’ve your attention…read on!

With Microsoft Azure and Office 365, Microsoft offers you a (cloud) platform with a huge potential to optimize and boost your business. In this blog I’ll illustrate this with a simple example of how you can use these cloud services to improve collaboration within your organization.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is a progress; working together is a success.

The challenge

Getting things done at work means sharing information and collaborating across ad hoc groups and project teams.  But, often times the tools we use to bring people together are different in each app—distribution groups in Outlook, buddy lists in Skype for Business, groups in Yammer and sites in SharePoint.  That’s why Microsoft introduced Groups in Office 365, so you can easily connect with your colleagues, share information and use applications you need to do more.

A group is a shared workspace for email, conversations, files, and calendar events where group members can conveniently collaborate and quickly get stuff done.

Since we aligned our existing expertise teams with Microsoft’s Platform, Productivity and Workplace strategy we started using Groups in Office 365. This results that colleagues more often work together, sharing knowledge more easier and perhaps most important the awareness that we’re working together as team.

Currently Groups will show up within the web experiences of Office 365 email and calendar and OneDrive for Business and Office 2016 preview. In upcoming phases, Microsoft will add Yammer and Skype for Business to the Groups experience to help you do even more.

Self-Service Group Management with Azure Active Directory Premium

The power of Microsoft’s cloud platform is the integration of it’s online cloud solutions like Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Intune and CRM. Combining the strength of Office 365 Groups with Self-Service group management with Azure Active Directory Premium provides you even more capabilities.

Self-service group management enables users to create and manage security- and Office 365  groups in Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) and offers users the possibility to request security group memberships, which can subsequently be approved or denied by the owner of the group. By using self-service group management features, the day-to-day control of group membership can be delegated to people who understand the business context for that membership.

Recap

With this I showed you what it takes to improve business processes and collaboration and enable your employees. With Azure AD and Office 365 you still take benefit of your current on-premise infrastructure combined with the power of Microsoft Online cloud solutions. Our teams located in different countries works more and more closely together where physical boundaries belongs to the past.

Happy collaboration!

Ronny de Jong