Microsoft Teams: 7 Elements for Successful Strategy and Planning Infographic and Recordings

Microsoft Teams is Hot!  We had a fantastic turnout of over 630 registered and 312 who joined me online.  I’m sure even more will benefit from the deck and recording so I’m posting it here.  I’m also going to include some of the Q&A including some of the questions that I may have missed.

Online Recording “Microsoft Teams: 7 Critical Elements for Successful Strategy and Planning” (requires first name, last name and email to the sponsor)

Slides/PDF of “Microsoft Teams: 7 Critical Elements for Successful Strategy and Planning” (slideshare view online or login to download the PDF)

Download the Essential Teams Planning Infographic (right click and save as)

Q&A From the Webinar:

Q. Please define RACI and DLP –

A. RACI – Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed often used in a sentence like RACI charts.  Used with determining roles and responsibilities.  DLP – Data Loss Prevention – Features in Office 365 that can be leveraged to report, warn, or block content that matches patterns.  Microsoft has over 50 templates out of the box that can be used to identify credit cards, or ID cards and so on.

Q. I thought MS was sunsetting SharePoint. Is Teams taking its place?  No No A. No!  Microsoft is NOT sunsetting SharePoint by any means.  Teams is the new hotness, and it integrates very well with SharePoint as a new interface and even potentially a front end to SharePoint.  SharePoint is still a major investment both on premise and in the cloud and continues to grow in Office 365 as a pillar of the platform.

Q. Just out of curiosity, why is not Team Live Meeting used for this session, instead of GoToWebinar?

A. We use Teams for our User Groups meetings broadcasting.  You could do anonymous Teams webinars, but it is not currently setup to support self service registration, and is still missing a lot of key features to make it a viable webinar platform.   That would be cool and I would welcome it!

Q. Teams or Yammer for executive communication within a company?  A. Both.  Depends on the size of the company and of the type of broadcast or Q&A you’re looking to do.  I do suggest looking at both.

Q. When will Teams officially support meetings and calling in a VDI environment?

A. Here’s the latest on VDI and Teams https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-for-vdi

Q. When will Teams be able to open multiple Windows?

A. With over 10,000 votes the product team is working on it.  Keep voting up the best features.

Q. Tips on avoiding Team sprawl (can’t set membership to channels as projects)? One headache, can’t schedule meeting to channel w/out notifying all.

A. Working on it.  Coming soon. Private channels will let you change membership on channels.

Q. When can we delete conversations?

A. Only 92 votes as of now.  You’re going to have to vote for it.

Q. Could Teams be an effective task management solution?

A. For consolidation absolutely, look at the rich integration with Trello, Planner, To Do, Jira and Outlook.  I think so!

Q. Do you think there is still a need for a corporate intranet when Teams is so robust and can connect to so many other apps?

A. I think this could be the evolution of the Intranet in the long term.  In the short term, the intranet should be integrated.  Love to explore this with you.

Q. What’s your recommendation for Yammer given how collaborative and conversational Teams is? Is it best used for enterprise-wide conversations?

A. Yes and No.  Yammer does enterprise wide outer loop really well and captures knowledge very well.  Teams scales to 5000 users, is great for quick conversations and threads, but has some challenges with stickyness.  If you come back from being gone for a week it’s difficult to see the most popular conversations in teams, but

Q. Wow ! Team Papers !! Can you please send a link where i can read more ? That was incredible but too fast for us 🙂

A. http://pervasent.com/teams-papers/

Q. Can you chat out the link for the infographic?

A. 

Microsoft Teams Doorway to the Microsoft Modern Workplace Infographic

Q. Where do I find out where the SharePoint Saturdays are? The one I found in Baltimore was for 2018.

A. http://spsevents.org

Q. We’re moving to the MS PBX solution. Looks like we need to stay with S4B for a while. Any thoughts and insides on the roadmap of teams and PBX?

A. Cloud PBX is going country by country.  You could pilot and slowly rollout Teams for collaboration and use Teams where the countries are supported.  I wouldn’t let the PBX or Voice portion alone keep us from adoption Teams for the powerful chat, desktop sharing, and collaboration.

Q. Can I use Teams to asynchronously submit document(s) for review (and the reviewers may pass that on serial to more than one person) culminating in a response to the initiator?

A. Yes, with an Approval Flow.

Q. A problem we experienced with SharePoint (cloud) is Microsoft revisions/improvements broke prior working implemented sites. We had constant maintenance overhead just keeping existing stuff working as Microsoft evolved SharePoint. Is that getting better across these tools?

A. Yes, if you focus on using Teams as the interface, it’s an Azure substrate and leverages Exchange and SharePoint Online for storage of messages, files, wikis, history, voicemails and lists.  The special sauce is connectors, tabs, and bots… this keeps it fairly easy to migrate, backup, and so on as the data is in files and the focus is on the interface as it is simply an abstraction from the data.