written by
Zack Calloway

Another 3 Powerful Lesser-Known Apps in Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 Tech Tips 3 min read

All this past month, we’ve been covering a number of powerful apps hiding within Microsoft 365. These are apps that you’re already paying for if your company has a Microsoft 365 license, and they can unlock powerful functionality for you.

But many businesses don’t even know these apps are there, let alone that they can already use them for free (as a part of their Microsoft 365 site license.)

If you’ve missed our previous two posts, this is what we’ve covered so far.

In the first post, we covered these three apps:

  • Bookings
  • Whiteboard
  • Planner

And in the second post, we showed you what these three apps can do:

  • Power Automate
  • Power Apps
  • SharePoint

If you haven’t caught those blog posts yet, check them out now. When you’re ready, it’s time for one last set of three for today’s post:

  • Yammer
  • Stream
  • To Do

Yammer

First up is Yammer, a business social networking app designed for internal use at medium to large companies. It’s like an internal Facebook alternative for your company, designed for the sharing of business-related but still social material.

Yammer integrates with Teams, of course, and some of the functionality overlaps a bit. It also shares some similarities with third-party social chat apps like Slack or Discord.

Where Teams limits communication to, well, smaller teams of people, Yammer can include areas that are open to the entire company.

If you’re looking to build a better sense of community in the context of a large or distributed workforce, Yammer can be a great way to do it.

Stream

If Yammer is Facebook for your business, Stream is the YouTube equivalent. It’s a place for sharing videos with a business focus. And, of course, it’s integrated with Teams.

For example, if you host a meeting on Teams and choose to record that meeting, Teams will automatically use Microsoft Stream for encoding, uploading, and serving up that video to the right attendees.

You can also use Stream to upload any kind of internal video, from training courses to company updates to whatever else makes sense for your business.

And just like YouTube, you can create channels and share content socially. Stream integrates with Yammer and SharePoint, too, so you can place videos on your SharePoint intranet site or share them on your internal Yammer network.

To Do

We don’t need to say a whole lot about this one, right? To Do is exactly what it sounds like: a to-do list app. And while there are plenty of those available (including, you know, the paper-and-pen variety), To Do really packs in the functionality.

The app started its life as Wunderlist, which might give you a hint about what’s hiding under the surface. These lists are collaborative, assignable, and interactive, allowing list owners to prioritize and assign tasks. Users can add notes to a list or list item and check off items that have been completed.

Everything syncs across devices and can be integrated with Teams and other apps, too.

In a way, To Do is more like Trello Lite than it is a glorified to-do list. It can do a lot.

Blue Ridge Technology Can Help With Your Microsoft 365 Deployment — and More

Even across this set of three blog posts, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what Microsoft 365 can do. We haven’t even gotten into how you can better leverage the main apps like Word and Excel or how transformative OneDrive can be for businesses of all sizes.

For better help with your Microsoft 365 deployment, Blue Ridge Technology is here to help. Whatever your IT needs, we can meet them.

Ready to see what we can do? Let’s chat.

Microsoft Office To-Do Yammer