Microsoft Teams goes live today

With the much publicised launch of Microsoft Teams for general availability today, Business Cloud Integration takes a look at why, who and when you should use them.

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Join us for the online launch event at 15:30 (GMT) today (Tuesday 14th March) to find out more, where Microsoft Corporate Vice President Kirk Koenigsbauer and a special guest will discuss perspectives about teamwork, what's new in Microsoft Teams, and share how customers are using Office 365 to collaborate more effectively and deliver results.  Click here to register for free.

Business Cloud Integration writes:

We've been using Microsoft Teams in our organisation since they launched the preview, and here's our advice for getting the most from Teams.

First of all: What's a Team?

While this seems like an obvious question, the answer may not be what you expect. When you think of a team within your organisation, you probably think of the teams defined by your organisational and departmental structure, but we've found that Microsoft Teams is best used for virtual teams.

Organisational, department-led teams naturally all work together, and if you have adopted SharePoint within Office 365 already, you'll be leveraging the benefits of version control, document collaboration and sharing, and team calendars. You most likely also all sit within shouting distance of each other, and already work well as a group. You'll have intelligent save locations for your documents, a designated team of content leaders who publish information to the company (usually SharePoint) Intranet, and you'll be effectively communicating your team's role to the organisation via the Intranet, with regular updates and up to date information about team members.

Virtual teams however pop up on an as needed basis, either for ad-hoc projects, or as longer term strategy development teams. The membership of these teams can vary widely, pulling in people from different departments and countries, and can require a range of different permission levels.

For example your virtual team may include one person from Finance, two from Marketing, and a Project Manager, all of whom need to contribute to the project, as well as two Executives who need to know, but not contribute to, your team's purpose. These teams currently have no set location for document control, may have established a Yammer group (but nothing more), and are probably actively sharing documents via one or more OneDrive locations with only Yammer links to those documents.

This is where Microsoft Teams becomes the perfect solution: It's a collaborative space that sets up a site collection on SharePoint for documents, allows conversation in a Yammeresque style, and provides a central location to access that project information and conversation.

So what's new/different from Office 365 Groups?

Quite simply, the Microsoft Teams interface is much more useful and offers the ability to extend beyond the current offering.

Tabs

Project teams inevitably use a range of different tools and apps, and within Microsoft Teams, you can add "Tabs" that link out to line of business and third party services, such as Planner, Visual Studio, Power BI, YouTube, Hootsuite, and many more. With these tabs you can surface your service's web experience directly within Microsoft Teams, so that you can instantly access your service in the right context, and collaborate around its content. For example, one of our cross-functional Teams in Microsoft Teams links out to Visual Studio Team Services site to show the current project backlog.

Using all things Microsoft, you can extend the Microsoft Teams experience by developing tabs for integrating business services using code that has already been made available, to add things like maps and other useful tools. As the platform matures, we can expect more and more useful tab ideas to be developed and take off.

Membership

One of the big differences between a Microsoft Team vs a SharePoint team site is membership: In Microsoft Teams you are either a member of the team or you are not, there is no middle ground. This means that out of the box, documentation created in Microsoft Teams is not available to non members. This is not a major problem however. Since it is still a site collection, your Microsoft Team can be given a life cycle that means that once the project/work is complete, flows/workflows can publish the information to other locations, and sharing can be configured on the documents in the normal SharePoint way.

Think before you leap

Many organisations are likely to jump right in and start creating teams, but this runs the risk of creating a naming convention/sprawl nightmare, just as happened on the launch of Office 365 Groups.

We advise that you first pick a small team to work with the platform. This will allow you to evaluate the business value before mass deployment, and decide how your organisation will use the technology.

Without proper governance, and with so many locations for storage, it can already be confusing for end users to work out where to share/save/collaborate on documents, and it is your responsibility as an organisation to direct how and when tools should be used.

 

Business Cloud Integration Ltd offers Cloud, SharePoint and Office 365 consultancy in Cambridge and across the UK, delivering solutions that increase company productivity, streamline and automate business processes, and simplify and enhance collaborative working.

Visit our website to find out more

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