Microsoft 365: Overview for the Everyman

Without all the jargon, let's take a look at M365 at a high level and check out each app in isolation

Has your eyes started to bleed yet? Yes, this is Microsoft 365 in all it's glory, and this is not even including all the additional add-ons like Syntex and PowerApps.

it's a giant jungle of applications that are connected to each other, but amongst the chaos lies the genius.

I'll go over each app in simple terms and try not to complicated it.
Let's get straight to it, and start off with the easiest and most familiar one.

MS Office - Places where you do actual work and produce documents, spreadsheets, emails and notes. Let me state the obvious.
  • Word - Write documents
  • Excel - Do spreadsheets
  • PowerPoint - Do slides and presentations.
  • Outlook - Emails and stuff
  • OneNote - Writing notes and pseudo-wikis. Hardly anyone uses this.

Apps explained

SharePoint and OneDrive - Places where you store and open your files. Like you C: drive but it's online. OneDrive is like the place where you do your drafts and keep personal stuff like medical certificates and travel tickets. SharePoint is the place where you put up files Loads of stuff you can do with this and will be covered in more depth in another article.
Teams - This is like an app that's always on. It's primarily the "skin" on top of SharePoint as it does basically the same thing since SharePoint was universally deemed "too ugly" for average users. It manages your files into channels, which are like folders, and keeps everything easy to modify and interact with.

It's also the place where you chat with people, make video calls, use CoPilot and hold meetings. Pretty much indispensable in a modern workplace.
Outlook and Exchange - It's where you send and receive emails. if you have emails older than 1 year, your organisation might also implement "Online Archie" which puts your older emails into colder tier storage. If you're lucky enough to have shared mailboxes, or old enough to still be using public folders, then those are here too.
Azure - Pronounced "Ash-shure" or whatever. It's where your users profiles are stored centrally and then can drawn from within M365 apps. Also manages external guests, and has AI and storage as well if you want to use it that way.
Purview - Controls settings and policies across the whole M365 tenant. Like the control tower at and airport.
Dynamics - If you work with customers and clients and need to keep their contact details in a complicated CRM database then this is golden, but if you don't like most of us, then you'll likely give this a miss.
Now that we have seen the core products, now let's do a shorter rundown of some of the other apps.
I'll go over some of these in more details in other articles, but this is the general overview of the additional apps that pack a pretty big punch.

Power Apps - Create powerful apps that are bespoke. Serious data connections.
Power Automate - Do crazy automated flows between all the apps.
Power BI - Tableau is out, Power BI is in. Do next-level graphs and stuff.
Microsoft Fabric - Complex data analytics, labs, creation of semantic models and graphs, and potentially more.

Other stuff that are also pretty cool, if you need them