Research

Existing solutions review

Given the numerous benefits of working with Office 365, a lot of companies want their workers to on-board and start working with it. Traditionally, teaching sessions are used to teach workers about the new ways of working. While the teaching can provide the users the knowledge needed to on-board, without a proper direction and motivation, it is not an easy task to change the workers' old ways of working as they might feel like such a change is unnecessary and ignore the onboarding process.

To help employees onboard and adapt to using Office 365, the two most important aspects we need to consider are guidance and monitoring. A bot can effectively help users learn Office 365 through these two aspects.

Related technologies

Azure Bot Service:
We chose to work with Azure Bot Service [1]. The service provides us with an integrated environment with the Microsoft Bot Framework connectors and Bot builder SDKs for development of the bot. We worked on the bot in C#. With the services provided by Azure, we were able to build, connect, test, deploy, and manage the bot online.

While there are other options like python, they are ran locally and the running progress varies for different computers. This is a huge shortcoming for our project as we need to collaborate and work together. Furthermore, Azure Bot Service is up to date and well documented, which also allows us to learn and work with it more easily.



Power BI:
Power BI [2] is a data visualisation tool with flexible settings for different data models. By connecting it to Azure Application [3] Insights, data regarding users' on-boarding process can be displayed in a clear manner in different ways. For example, graphs displaying all users' progress can be shown to understand the on-boarding process in a company.

Summary of final decision

To help employees onboard and adapt to using Office 365, the two most important aspects we need to consider are guidance and monitoring. A bot can effectively help users learn Office 365 through these two aspects.

References

  • [1] Kaiqb. 2019. Azure Bot Service - Bot Service | Microsoft Docs.[ONLINE] Available at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/botservice/?view=azure-bot-service-4.0. [Accessed 20 February 2019].
  • [2] maggiesMSFT. 2019. Power BI documentation - Power BI | Microsoft Docs. [ONLINE] Available at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/. [Accessed 20 March 2019].
  • [3] davidiseminger. 2019. Azure and Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Docs. [ONLINE] Available at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/service-azure-and-power-bi. [Accessed 20 March 2019].