With COVID-19 continuing to impact people and countries around the world, employees everywhere are moving to remote work. More and more companies are choosing Microsoft Teams to create a remote collaborative workspace for their workers.
Adopting Microsoft Teams
With COVID-19 continuing to impact people and countries around the world, employees everywhere are moving to remote work. More and more companies are choosing Microsoft Teams to create a remote collaborative workspace for their workers. Here at Alitek, we use Teams exclusively to stay connected as we serve our customers across the country. We’ve also helped many organizations adopt Teams as part of their digital transformation. Given the emerging dominance of Teams as a key enabler of remote work, we’d like to share answers to some common questions about the platform.
What is Microsoft Teams and how does it enable remote work?
Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines chat, persistent workplace discussion, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. In short, Teams brings the people and documents we care about onto our workstations and phones in a very personal and immediate way to boost efficiency and facilitate collaboration.
In response to recent events, corporate leaders have been called upon to create a remote collaborative workspace for their employees, sometimes overnight. This often results in a patchwork of solutions, which don’t necessarily work well together. Teams helps companies prepare for the weeks and months ahead by rapidly enabling a working ecosystem for remote communication built on a common platform.
Where does Teams fit in my organization?
Teams is designed for functional groups of 2 – 100 people. It enables employees to work together more effectively by:
- Bringing existing teams together in virtual rooms
- Providing easy access to shared content
- Capturing ongoing discussions in a persistent thread
As illustrated below, Teams fills a gap in communication capabilities between individual-focused tools like Outlook and organization-wide tools like SharePoint. Together with these other solutions, Teams provides a complete communication strategy for your organization.
How does Teams work with other Microsoft 365 solutions?
Microsoft 365 products work together to create a collaborative environment where documents and information flow seamlessly from individual, to team, to enterprise. It’s important to understand that every Team is also a SharePoint site in your corporate intranet. Files saved to a team are automatically saved to each site, and vice versa. In addition, files can be synced from either application to your workstation with OneDrive.
When rolling out Teams, it’s essential to understand these relationships and plan for how the applications will work together. A good site plan can help reduce sprawl and improve understanding of where content and information are stored.
How does Teams compare to Skype?
Microsoft announced that Skype for Business will be retired on July 31, 2021. Teams is the designated successor. Ultimately, all Skype users will be required to upgrade to Teams, but in the meantime, there are many reasons to be proactive about upgrading.
Teams is already used by over 200,000 organizations worldwide and more than 13 million people on a daily basis. It’s easy to see why! Anyone who has used Teams knows that the user experience is far superior to Skype. Other articles do a great job of enumerating the many technical and UI improvements, but the three key features are the following:
- A high-quality mobile experience
- Persistent one-on-one chat
- The ability to create secure but permanent “teams” for ongoing group discussion
These features, plus the fact that Teams integrates with other Microsoft products like Outlook, Office, SharePoint, and OneDrive, make Teams a far superior product to Skype. As our CEO Mike Brookover said, “it looks like Microsoft got it right!”
What are the main governance considerations?
The rapid adoption of Teams raises an interesting set of issues for organizations, particularly those that operate at large scale. Without governance, new users set up multiple single purpose teams, instead of using channels and apps inside a team. Organizations are putting a high premium on tools to centralize and automate retention and disposition of conversations, membership permissions, and team creation and administration.
Following are the top governance considerations of organizations based on an AIIM Survey conducted in 2019.
© AIIM 2019, www.aiim.org
How do we upgrade from Skype?
There are a number of options, but the best way is to use Team’s built-in “Upgrade Modes” to replace and disable Skype in a controlled manner. Many companies try to use the default “Islands Mode” to allow both Teams and Skype to co-exist. Though tempting, this approach can actually delay adoption and make it more difficult to make the transition.
How can Alitek help?
Alitek can help enable your company for remote communication using Microsoft Teams. We have the knowledge and experience to roll Teams out to your users, show them how to use it effectively, and establish technical and conventional rules-of-the-road to ensure proper governance of the platform. In some cases, we can have your organization collaborating in as little as a week.
To learn more about how Alitek can help you and your company use Teams to support remote work and enhance your remote capabilities, please visit our website at www.alitek.com
About Alitek
Alitek is a leader in information based digital transformations. We help organizations improve business outcomes, increase efficiency, and reduce risk, through better management of information. Our experienced team works with you to build a unique strategic plan based on your specific needs, no matter the size of your company.
