Wild practices with Microsoft Teams

Now, it’s important for every organization to look beyond just turning on and using Microsoft Teams. How do you ensure that Microsoft Teams is fully integrated into your organization?

In this blog series on digital collaboration, we’ll explore the implementation of Microsoft Teams. Where is your organization starting from? How do you implement Microsoft Teams? And how do you ensure successful adoption?

Microsoft Teams Functionalities: The Integrated Workplace

Within Microsoft Teams, the focus is on communication, document collaboration, and access to services and apps. Microsoft Teams emphasizes quick and informal communication, making it ideal for teams, departments, and project groups that collaborate intensively. With specialized Teams hardware, meetings become completely independent of time and place. Together, these functionalities form an integrated workspace:

• Communication: As the successor to Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams offers the same features for chat, calls, and video conferencing. For example, you can start an instant meeting with just one click. This brings people working temporarily on the same project closer together and fosters team-building, even with external partners.

 

• Collaborating on documents: A document you drag into a chat window lands directly in the personal OneDrive for Business. If you share a file in a specific channel, it is stored on SharePoint Online, where everyone can work on the same file simultaneously.
  Filtering with channels: You’ll quickly notice the need to create some order. For each team, you can create channels, such as ‘marketing,’ ‘event,’ or ‘finance.’ A channel contains tabs for conversations, files, and notes. This allows for separate communication within a channel.

 

• Creating your own ecosystem: Through integration with all Microsoft applications, users can work from Microsoft Teams throughout the day. There are also connectors that fetch external read-only updates, for popular applications like Salesforce and Twitter, for example. There are now a few hundred applications available for analytics, customer service, IT and management, HR, and collaboration, and that number is growing rapidly.

 

• Collaborating anywhere: Bridging distance and space becomes even easier with Microsoft Teams hardware. Think of desk and conference phones, headsets, and room systems for creating a collaboration space. The Microsoft Surface Hub takes this to the next level: a digital whiteboard that allows communication through video, sound, and screen input.

Challenges for IT

As you can see, Microsoft Teams has all the ingredients for communication and collaboration within a single digital workspace. This ease of use leads to quick adoption, which can catch the IT department off guard. Before you know it, there’s a proliferation of various teams, and as an administrator, you’ll see an explosive increase in the use of various Azure resources. When creating Teams, the underlying Mailboxes and SharePoint sites are also automatically created. Without proper guidance and management, this can become chaotic. Before opening Microsoft Teams for use, there are several IT questions to answer. Do you actually need it, for example? Interactive workshops can help with the following key questions.

Where is your organization starting from?

Not every organization moves from a file server to Office 365 with Microsoft Teams. There may be an on-premise or online SharePoint environment that you want to start with in Microsoft Teams. Do you migrate the SharePoint sites one-to-one to Teams? Or do you move certain sites as channels within Teams? Do you leave the old sites as they are? And what about the intranet? The transition doesn’t have to be a big bang; it can also happen in stages, creating a hybrid situation. It’s all about creating structure and order for both the administrator and the user.

This is also where you consider compliance. Does Microsoft Teams offer enough options to meet internal regulations? For organizations that must adhere to strict rules, it’s possible that despite the user-friendly nature, the implementation of Microsoft Teams may not be feasible.

How do you implement Microsoft Teams?

Here, governance is key. Can everyone create teams? Can everyone be a team owner? Can everyone join as a member? How do you handle external users? And what about after a project is completed? Although Microsoft Teams has an archiving function, this doesn’t cut off access to files, and new users can still be invited. There is no lifecycle management within Microsoft Teams yet, which means IT must work with users to establish and follow rules.

Microsoft Teams lacks hierarchy or control; only someone designated as an owner facilitates. This way of working doesn’t fit every organization or department. Therefore, introduce Microsoft Teams gradually and within departments or teams where quick and informal communication is already common.

How do I ensure successful adoption?

Not only the implementation and migration require a plan, but it’s also wise to have a plan when users start adopting Microsoft Teams on their own. Just like with the file server, Microsoft Teams requires guidance and training for users. They need to know when to create a team and when to create a channel, how to handle new functionalities, and how to continue working and communicating in a way that fits within the culture. For example, you don’t want everyone suddenly starting meetings with large groups of people.

Implementing Microsoft Teams

The technical implementation isn’t particularly exciting. Microsoft Teams facilitates a new way of working together, independent of place and time, in a way that excites users. However, you can’t just turn on Microsoft Teams and wait; digital collaboration must meet the rules for compliance and governance. In the next blog, I’ll show you how to ensure that, so you can confidently start using Microsoft Teams.