Review of Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways
I've recently been doing a series of reviews of different tools available to support organisations in their adoption efforts. In this post I will review Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways. This is one I have been planning to write up for a while. I've been able to use the solution a handful of times this year and have seen the benefit of provisioning it.
What is Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways?
Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways, is a customisable SharePoint Online communication site that is provisioned into your tenant with ready made resources for supporting end users using Microsoft 365.
Once deployed you can customise the settings and create training playlists for your users.
There is also the ability to integrate with Teams via the app bar.
If you're looking to support your adoption efforts and provide your users with access to information and help on Microsoft 365 products, whether it's Excel or Microsoft Teams the site has videos and guides to support.
The solution is available from the SharePoint look book site. The site holds many examples of sites you can provision to your environment. Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is available under the Solution area and details everything you will need to know. For more information you can also see the Microsoft overview page here.
Benefits of deploying Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways to your tenant.
Over the years I have created numerous help sites for clients, which takes time and needs regular maintenance. Deploying Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways comes with several benefits including:
1. Speeds up development time.
No longer do you need to spend days or weeks creating your own help sites. Once provisioned the site is ready to go with a few tweaks. So if your organisation is a bit behind on its prep for adoption deploying this solution can save a lot of time.
2. Up-to-date content.
One of the common pitfalls in creating your own help site is that you have to go looking for resources and links. If your referencing old PDF files or non Microsoft pages the content may be out of date quickly with the rate things change in Microsoft 365. The resources in this site are pulled directly from Microsoft support pages.
3. Deploy in 4 steps
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| 4 steps to deploy |
Deployment can be done relatively fast. When I've provisioned the sites in the past it can take up to an hour to walk through the steps. Once completed it may take a little time to provision. Then once you get an email it's ready to access and customise.
When I have provisioned the site I usually plan to spread it over 2 days. I would start the provisioning process on day 1 and on day 2 I would customise. This allows me to focus on other project tasks while it is being provisioned. I have even started the provisioning at the end of a day and come in the next morning to do the customisations. It doesn’t take long but I find these approaches help free me up to focus on other tasks.
Customising is relatively simple, you can configure and hide playlists that are not relevant to your organisation through an admin page.
Once you've configured it's then just a case of working with the permission groups and its ready to share with your users! So with very little work you can go live fast!
4. Integration with Teams
With Microsoft Teams fast becoming an organisations core tool for collaboration adding the app to the Teams environment means users don't have to leave Teams, and Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is available from their app bar.
This again is a relatively simple process for us to do. Following the steps on SharePoint look book page makes it straight forward to do, should you decide to make it available in Teams.
Summary
Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways as a solution will save you so much time on developing your own adoption help site. Having spent many projects developing similar sites I can see the real benefit of provisioning these sites and have used on some recent projects.
I really like the fact that you can add this solution as an app in Teams. However there is a risk with all the additional apps an organisation might want to add in that it gets lost in the users Teams app bar. A workaround might be to add the solution as a link on your intranet\company portal or if you have an org-wide Team to add it as a SharePoint tab in one of the relevant channels. There are lots of options fortunately.
Although the site is provisioned with all the Microsoft links and resources, as a organisation you may want to produce your own resources that are specific to your users and how they will interact with the tools. Once provisioned you can still add your own customised materials. With clients I've often had to create custom support pages or videos and you can still do that here to personalise it to your organisation. This will obviously increase the amount of time before the site can go live or you may take an approach where you start with the M365 resources and add your custom content over time.
As an adoption tool this is well worth a look if you are able to provision into your organisation. I would recommend that you spend time planning out what your end users will need and change the landing page and navigation to suit. You might also want a short welcome video explaining how and why to use the site.
Utilising this tool and the others out there will improve your users adoption journey. The greatest challenge you will face as an organisation rolling out your modern workplace tools is ensuring you spend enough time planning adoption.
As a consultant I often find organisations only think of adoption as training and do not spend the time planning adoption and working with the relevant stakeholders. Fortunately there are lots of resources out there to support us in helping our users adopt great tools like Microsoft Teams. Many consultancy firms also offer services to guide you through adoption, but if your company doesn't have the budget for these services then utilising these tools combined with the right adoption strategy and comms campaigns will go a long way to providing your end users with the support they will need.
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