If you work for an organisation that already uses Office 365, or in a company that’s been considering using Office 365, we’re guessing that Microsoft Teams is a topic that has come up often.
And no matter what your industry or company size, we know you likely have all sorts of questions about Microsoft Teams and some of the underlying technologies found in Office 365.
Below are some of the most common Microsoft Teams queries that we have come across.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a workspace, or a “collaboration hub” as many refer to these workspaces, found within Office 365 that provides real-time collaboration, communication, virtual meetings using audio and video functionality, and file sharing, all within a single application.
It enables cross-organisation groups to easily create and use these workspaces in an intuitive manner, placing the most common collaboration and communication functions at everyone’s fingertips.
Why Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a game-changer for companies wanting to increase their collaboration and employee engagement in order to increase their productivity across the board.
Microsoft Teams is now approaching its third-year anniversary from when Microsoft originally announced its release and the increase in usage over that time has been simply astonishing. So what are the reasons for this growth?
Current Office 365 users get Teams at no additional cost and its wide array of capabilities such as: 1:1 or 1:Many conversations and video; team-specific configurations via tabs and channels; in-context co-authoring of documents; tight integration with SharePoint, OneDrive, and OneNote; and enterprise voice and calling capabilities.
It’s great for companies wanting to increase their collaboration and employee engagement and its fairly simple to do. A Team or workspace can be quickly created for different groups who want to communicate and collaborate in a secure, protected, mobile-friendly, and intuitive manner, with little IT overhead. In conjunction with the other Office 365 applications, Teams has proven to truly change the way companies and organisations work – finally we have an application that is transforming the digital workspace by giving the average employee a way to engage with others as they and the organisation as a whole dramatically increases their productivity and effectiveness.
Microsoft Teams user adaption discussion
First, let’s define the term Adoption by using Microsoft’s definition of “Service Adoption:” the ability of an organisation to drive healthy usage of the business and technical capabilities that are delivered to employees.
Healthy usage refers to the ability for employees to use these capabilities to deliver business outcomes in their organisation. Essential to this goal is the focus on the employee experience and their digital literacy with the relevant tools and processes that are delivered in combination by business and IT leaders.
Teams has the potential for broad organisational impact which is why adoption of Teams should be deliberate and involve many stakeholders. This often includes IT staff, senior business leaders, HR, and end users who are all eager to learn how to best use Teams in the organisation but probably have different levels of knowledge and perspectives on its capabilities.
Skype for business roadmap
Microsoft Teams is replacing Skype for Business. If your organisation uses Skype for Business you should begin planning right away.
Skype and Teams can coexist for some time however some customers are set to automatically be upgraded by Microsoft. The technical side of the upgrade is only one part of the equation.
The second part? This upgrade will impact your business users significantly and with all the features that come along with Teams it will change the way you work – change management, governance and training should be addressed before you upgrade. We are happy to guide you through this process.
Microsoft Teams worries
Based on our experience, without governance, we can almost guarantee a combination of several negative consequences that your organisation will face, to include:
- Confusion and frustration – rapid and uncontrolled growth in teams resulting in difficulty in finding information, difficulty in finding teams relevant to different users, Teams that have duplicate purposes, conflicting guidance to users of when to use Teams vs. Groups vs. Email vs. SharePoint, etc.
- Risk to sensitive information – Unintended information leaks to external guests, storing information that violates company compliance requirements, retaining / removing information that violates company record retention policies, and potential threats that gain access to the entire platform through phishing and malware attacks.
- Low user adoption – Without a training plan for administrators, managers, and end users hasn’t been designed and resourced, user adoption decreases, the organisation’s ROI will be significantly lower since people won’t know how to use a platform that they’ve invested in. Users will also not trust the environment, thus decreasing their overall acceptance and usage.
The good news is that most of these challenges can be overcome through implementing best practices & good governance plan, a well-defined governance structure, designing and implementing user adoption plans that are aligned to the organisation’s culture and business objectives, and providing high-quality end user education on a recurring basis. We are as an expert can guide you through this process.
Microsoft and Office 365 Consultants, Prometix are a Microsoft Gold certified partner, we have extensive experience in delivering Microsoft Teams based solutions. We can guide you through the implementations, best practices and help create certainty with Microsoft solutions. For any information please contact us for more information enquiries@prometix.com.au
