Microsoft Teams

[jtr63]

My company is beginning to adopt Microsoft Teams. I have found with adoptions of this kind, the evangelicals will expect everyone to take it up and start using it as quickly as they have, without explanation and training on how to get the best out of it. Does anyone have real experience of Teams ? What are the real advantages that can be leveraged from using it ? Any references to white papers, etc. on the subject.

TIA
John

[torata]

This is my experience after my company introduced Teams as part of a digital upgrade that included moving to Office 365 and use of OWA only. The whole thing was generally very poorly thought out, although a move in the right direction (in that anything was better than what we had).

• It's a copy of Slack, built on Skype.
• Most people continue to use email intra-employees, thus negating the basic premise that Teams is internal communication and email is then reserved for external. We introduced Yammer also, so there are now effectively 3 methods for internal communication instead of one. There's no single portal in place that works.
• Teams is a real pain with files. It's designed to keep all the files related to a project in one place. All this does is mean that files get separated off (ie not readily available when you want to recycle work), which is 100% opposite of our original and still used central repository.
• It's good if you're working collaboratively, but as we've always worked sequentially, it's rarely used. And online file editing is more cumbersome than desktop based as right click is limited.
• The most useful thing is for immediate telecon/videocon with screen sharing. There's a lot of teleworking in my company.
• I think it can work, and probably does work well if all members of a particular team are committed to using it, but there needs to be some thought about how to use it effectively and efficiently. One team I was in used it to communicate consistently, but for example minutes for meetings ended up in ppt files (both in teams and in the repository), on the chat, and in the minutes section. I have one client who does everything internal by Slack and it clearly works for them.
• Chat works more like conversation, so there's none of the salutation and sign off that generally happens in email. Saves a few seconds...

torata

[kiloran]

My company is beginning to adopt Microsoft Teams. I have found with adoptions of this kind, the evangelicals will expect everyone to take it up and start using it as quickly as they have, without explanation and training on how to get the best out of it. Does anyone have real experience of Teams ? What are the real advantages that can be leveraged from using it ? Any references to white papers, etc. on the subject.

TIA
John

I'm perhaps going a bit off-topic here since I know little about Teams, but I have been heavily involved in implementing and rolling out software over many projects in a global company.

From what you have described, it will fail. No explanation, no training.

For any project such as this, the actual software is probably a minor detail. The most important thing for success is training, to include:

• The reason for adoption, and advantages (and disadvantages!)
• Documented business processes and operating procedures for using the new tool
• How success will be measured
• Training tailored to each job role

Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now

--kiloran

[stewamax]

We introduced Yammer also

Torata - it would be interesting if you could compare/contrast Yammer and Teams

[AF62]

Does anyone have real experience of Teams ?

Yes I do, and you have my sympathy that your company is introducing it.

Everything torata says is correct.

The whole 'structure' of the software is a mess, so it is impenetrable to anyone other than a software geek, and as a result everyone ignores it unless they are forced not to.

Similar to that which torata mentions, in my organisation people continue to use email rather than message in Teams. File management is horrible and the online editing is just painful. And really, really stupidly, Teams does not support the uploading of emails from Outlook, so if you want to save the output from those who have been conversing by email, then you are screwed.

The video conferencing is ok, but to be honest I can't see anything much better in that Skype didn't have.

it would be interesting if you could compare/contrast Yammer and Teams

Teams - One to One 'chats' or discussions within a small group in a team - rather like text messages or Whatsapps.

Yammer - More of a forum (like this) with Yammer groups around subjects and the format encouraging longer posts, and with the ability to have closed membership groups.

[servodude]

All the points above are really good

A lot of places change process, or install systems without having a good understanding of why or how they are going to be used; this leads to poor take up and an underwhelming experience, so places change again to something else
- a fact used to great effect in this recent offering: https://fibery.io/anxiety (...its not a spoof)

Teams itself seems to be straddling a few jobs in a way that I wouldn't have expected someone to try
- I get the consolidation of chat, messaging, calls and video but adding file storage in to the mix just seems wrong

TBH though the whole of Office 365 seems like a clunky port of a desktop app to the web, not a lot of it makes sense
- but if it's where things are being done it's best if everyone tries to do stuff in the same place

-sd

[stewamax]

Teams - One to One 'chats' or discussions within a small group in a team - rather like text messages or Whatsapps.
Yammer - More of a forum (like this) with Yammer groups around subjects and the format encouraging longer posts, and with the ability to have closed membership groups.

And to stir the pudding further, MSFT has introduced Kaizala - their version of WhatsApp (but which is currently without video sessions)

[didds]

we use teams. whilst it is company wide i rarel;y from my perspective used mych outside of our immediate team, thopugh it is useful for also communicating with perpheral people.

as a team with diverse locations (UK office, India office, and home workers) it does generally work well although there is a bit of a issue nin that it seems to show at most only four "live" windws of people's faces etc... and sometimes the window showing a room of people shows only half of them (vertical split). So in that regards its a bit cludgy. As a "quick vaht" (CF FB messenger) type interface it works well. One can also directly sxcreen share and teleconference, although there seems no way to do so from an RDP'd session (eg home laptop RDP to desktop in a data centre and teams running on that) and get any microphone from laptop wortking with it so one has to open teams on the laptop locally instead. Also teams permits "channels" of disucssion so we have a few relevenat channels within our department for specifc areas so we have dept threads viewable and answerable to all of our team.

not sure about the document storage thing as we also use sharepoint for such.

Then there is email but on the whole teams does seem to have usurped the casual use of that. emails tend to be very soepciifc between our team now.

ON the whole I find it very very useful. that however maybe because of the manner in which "we" work etc.

didds

[quelquod]

Shame it doesn’t have a spellchecker.