This Week in IT – Zoom Is Getting Microsoft 365 App Integration

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This Week in IT, Microsoft announced that Zoom will be integrating Microsoft 365 apps through the new Microsoft 365 Document Collaboration Partner Program. The program allows eligible providers to integrate M365 apps into their platforms.

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This Week in IT, Microsoft announced that Zoom will be integrating Microsoft 365 apps through the new Document Collaboration Partner Program. The program allows eligible partners to integrate Microsoft 365 apps into their platforms. So stay tuned to find out what this means for Zoom and other collaboration solutions. [Music]

Welcome to This Week in IT. The program where I discuss everything connected to Microsoft 365, Windows and Azure. But before I get started today I’ve got a quick favour to ask you. About 60% of the people who watched last week’s video weren’t subscribed to the channel. As we go live today we’re on about 3,380 subscribers and I’d really love it if we could push that this week beyond the 3,400 mark. So if you’d like to see this kind of video every week then please subscribe to the channel and don’t forget to hit the bell notification to make sure you don’t miss out on the latest uploads. Integration seems to be in fashion at the moment.

In last week’s video we talked about a new integration feature between Outlook Teams and the Edge browser that essentially allows you to carry on working without disruptive window switching and losing context. So that means not losing the actual item that you’re working on. And Microsoft is of course big on this at the moment as they’re integrating AI into everything with CoPilot in Microsoft 365. Now while Teams is still the biggest enterprise collaboration solution on the market, of course Zoom is kind of synonymous with the whole online meeting phenomena if you like. It really took off during Covid as did Teams of course. And Microsoft is well aware of that. That Zoom is their next biggest competitor.

But one of the problems with Zoom if you’re using Microsoft 365 applications like OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, all that kind of thing is that there’s no native integration for those apps inside Zoom. That is until now. Earlier this month Microsoft announced the Document Collaboration Partner Program that will allow eligible independent software vendors to integrate Microsoft 365 apps into their own collaboration platforms. Microsoft says that this is going to allow users to share, edit and co-author in Microsoft 365 apps within those third-party collaboration solutions.(…) Now there are two different options that vendors can implement into their products. They are called the Web Option and the Live Option.

Now the Web Option provides the sharing, the collaboration and those co-authoring experiences outside of actual meetings and it’s going to support Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive for business. There’s also going to be a Live App option which builds on everything that you get with the Web App option but also includes integration experiences inside meetings. So you will get PowerPoint Live and Excel Live.(…) So that allows people in a meeting to actually collaborate and work on a document in real time and presenters will get things like meeting notes and presenter view. And of course people who use PowerPoint Live in Teams will be very familiar with that experience.

Now as part of this announcement Microsoft said that Zoom is going to be the first partner to adopt this program and Brendan Ittelson, who’s the Chief Ecosystem Officer for Zoom, said that users had long been requesting this integration with Zoom and Microsoft 365 apps and that Zoom is very excited to see what they’re able to do with this program and of course offer for Zoom users. So while this is all well and good there are a couple of caveats.(…)

So, not any ISV is going to be able to sign up for this. You’re going to need to meet a strict set of requirements, the main one being that you must be offering some kind of platform that includes online meetings and a chat experience. So this isn’t available to any kind of solution, it needs to be something specific along the lines of what Zoom and Slack offer. And another caveat is that it’s not going to be free for those ISVs so there’s going to be an initial onboarding fee and also an annual fee so that Microsoft can recover the operating costs.

But why is Microsoft doing this right now?(…) Well of course there are various different reasons.(…) Microsoft understands that they probably need to meet these Zoom customers where they’re at. If they haven’t moved teams now it’s maybe something that they’re not going to do at least in the short term. So this allows Microsoft to encourage more people to sign up for Microsoft 365 subscriptions even if they’re using another online collaboration solution like Zoom. It also might help Microsoft stave off antitrust actions in the future. If Microsoft is given third parties like Zoom the ability to integrate access to user documents on Microsoft’s platform.

So, I think this is an interesting development but personally I feel this potentially adds complexity for SMEs. Of course you know it’s really better if you can to just have everything in one platform. It makes everything much simpler and it actually gives you functionality that you probably wouldn’t get otherwise unless you have the(…) enterprise expertise to implement things like integration between different platforms using the Microsoft Graph which adds complexity and isn’t really available to smaller organizations.

If you can have everything in Zoom or everything in Google Workspace or everything in Microsoft 365 you’re probably going to be better off.(…) And of course if you can have everything in Microsoft 365 you can also then take advantage of things like Teams Premium and CoPilot. Of course you have to pay for those things but at least all of your information is there and you can get an experience from those add-ons that’s really worth something.

Of course if you have data and experiences on other platforms then AI and Teams Premium all this kind of stuff are going to really be limited in what they can offer you. But of course if your organization uses Zoom but also Microsoft 365 and for whatever reason you don’t plan to move away from Zoom for your online meetings and chat then of course this is definitely something that you should look at when it becomes available. And I think the big thing that I’m very interested to see is will Slack adopt this because obviously that’s the other big competitor to Microsoft Teams.

Let me know what you think about this upcoming feature in the comments below. Is it something that your organization would make use of? If you’re using Zoom do you also use Microsoft 365? I’d love to know what you think. If you found this video useful then I’d really love it if you gave it a thumbs up because that helps us to get the video seen by more people on YouTube and grow the channel. I’m going to leave you with another video on the screen now about the integration between Outlook and Teams with the Edge browser that I talked about at the beginning of the video so do check that out. But that’s it from me for this week and I’ll see you next time.