Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
We’ve been contacted by many of organizations that can’t justify the annual licensing costs for Jive when they already have Microsoft 365 (which includes Yammer for Social and SharePoint for Document Management/ECM).
These conversations have been focused primarily on Intranets – the sites that internal employees use for collaboration. Jive remains a dominant player in building external communities (and from an outsider looking in, it looks like Microsoft is conceding some areas with announcements about no longer supporting Public sites on Microsoft 365).
I had a question from a customer last week about wanting to know the other reasons why to make the move as a part of their business case.
Here’s my initial list of additional reasons –
Speed of Innovation
For many years, Jive was able to run rings around SharePoint because of the three year update cycle of SharePoint. Three years is an eternity when it comes to collaboration, especially social. With the acquisition of Yammer, and probably even more important the adoption on continuous delivery, Microsoft is moving as fast as it’s smaller competitors.
Clear Roadmap
The sales tactic of, “It’s coming in an upcoming version (and it doesn’t come for years),” is no longer being employed. Kudos to the Microsoft 365 team for putting out a clear roadmap – I haven’t seen this level of transparency from a software company.
Office Anywhere
I didn’t see this coming. Microsoft has been putting out solid versions of Office on iOS and Android. They are embracing other platforms and this strategy is succeeding. Employees can BYOD and Microsoft is enabling their productivity – regardless of their choice of device.
CEO Clarity
Here’s a quote from Satya Nadella (TechCrunch Nov 2014 article) –
I just think about three things. There are a few other efforts we do, and I’ve been very clear about those efforts and why they exist and why we are proud of them. But, there are three products in all of this. There is Windows, there is Microsoft 365, and there is Azure. That’s it. Everything else to me is, of course, you can call them features, you can call them parts of that, and even there there’s complexity. Do we need to tame it make sure that we’re not inundated by lots and lots of things? But, from a business model, from what moves the needle for both usage and our revenue, those are the three big things that we are very, very focused on.
Thanks to the new CEO, Microsoft has never been more focused than it is now.
What would you add to this list?
Leave a comment below if there are other reasons you would add if you’re having the same discussion internally.
3 Comments
Tommy Ryan
Great points Danny! I would probably add a unified collaboration stack. With Microsoft 365, you get social features (like Jive), document sharing features (like Dropbox, Box), and IM (really looking forward to what we will see with Skype for Business) on top of all the other commodity services you get like SharePoint and Exchange.
With all these services in one platform (Microsoft 365), you start seeing some interesting possibilities with leverage all the signals that are tracked in the Office Graph. Seeing apps like Delve, start to show you the power of bringing all your collaboration under one platform (Microsoft 365).
dannyryan
That's a nice one to add...thanks Tommy!