General Consultant Discussion

Not sure if anyone is interested in this kind of stuff or not? We are moving on to Microsoft Teams internally to collaborate easier. We're virtual and most of our clients are remote so this is critical for us. Teams is pretty damn amazing so far. I'm going to write it up as we learn our lessons on using it for internal organization and customer collaboration. Hopefully people can learn from our wins and mis-steps. If you are using it internally, I would love to hear your recommendations of what works and what to avoid. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ever-feel-like-you-late-dance-peter-wolf/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ever-feel-like-you-late-dance-peter-wolf/

I clearly fail social - I don't know why my link didn't show up in a pop up box. Whatever ... lol.

We aren't currently using it but 60 % of my staff is remote and I'm looking for ways to leverage Teams. Just don't have time to focus on it due to other projects in process. I would love to learn from your journey. Thank you for sharing.

Try to add me to a public group - wayne@s-consult.com and let me know how you make out

I couldn't really figure out why it's better than something like yammer/socialcast but I probably didn't give it a fair shake

It's better if you are on O365 since you don't have to provision people. With Socialcast it's a nightmare if you have large numbers of people and are constantly adding or removing people.

We looked at it and it's okay but didn't have enough of the features we needed without O365.

We use it internally for 1/2 of our team as a trial. The other half use Slack. We have also used Skype and left it. Teams seems good for keeping historical threads. To me it is a little more cumbersome to navigate but it definitely works well. We do use O365 and it is included. That makes the pricing right. Slack is better in my opinion, but we use the free version and it does not retain all of the history due to the free version. We like it because it somehow interacts with some of our development tools (just got in WAY over my head).

The worst thing about Teams is the name. When we use Slack or Skype, you can ""slack"" someone or ""skype"" someone. It makes no sense to ""team"" someone. That almost sounds illegal.

@CooperBlack I've used a lot of Slack communities and the hidden gotcha is the storage limit. Once you hit the limit you get nag messages regularly. The other thing that makes Slack less than ideal is that it handles threaded messaging very poorly. They added message threading (where you have a main message and then many replies) after the fact and it really looks like they bolted it on and didn't make it a well thought out capability of Slack. On the upside - Slack is the best at integrating multiple people when they may not be all from the same company. It's super easy to add them to public and private areas. I have not tried to add people to Teams who are outside the O365 domain of the company but expect that it's not going to be seamless primarily because MSFT wants to sell O365 licenses. Google has a groups service as well but it's 100% limited to people who are part of your G-Suite domain. Right now I actively use Teams and have one Skype group chat. Both seem to work pretty well.

@WayneSchulz Adding members from outside your organization can be done though I think an Admin can block that feature.

Yes but it [seems a bit messy](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-joins) - Step 3 The guest receives a welcome email from the team owner, with information about the team and what to expect now that they're a member. Guest users who have an email address that belongs to an Azure Active Directory or Office 365 work or school account can accept the invitation directly. If the guest doesn't yet have a Microsoft Account associated with their email address, they will be directed to create one for free. After accepting the invitation, the guest can participate in teams and channels, receive and respond to channel messages, access files in channels, participate in chats, join meetings, collaborate on documents, and more.

I will write up some additional articles as we move along. Some quick points: 1. The navigation is like most systems - you get used to it. One ""trick"" that helps me is shrinking the font size in the web browser window so I can see more in one screen than the default which, in my opinion, is too big / kind of worthless with such limited info being shown. 2. The key to setting it up seems to have some oversight and governance on naming conventions and principles of use. This is not our strong suit honestly but with a few simple principles, it's looking a lot more structured. 3. We've added external users and it hasn't been too difficult but maybe as we do it more often, we will be frustrated and disappointed. I'll let you know how it works out. 4. I think Moira (and a few others) are spot on that having O365 really doubles down on the value. The simple answer is everyone should get on O365. :) 5. A big part of value is setting up a channel with all the stuff a group of people might need to do a specific project or set of tasks. So, I can set up a ""CRM Roll-out"" channel and add in a tab that has a to-do list, a tab for training videos, a tab for a wiki / knowledgebase of tips and tricks, the built-in chat, and more. It's definitely not perfect but for us it's better than it was with the separate tools. I'll share more as we learn more.

One downside I've found is you create a team. Within the team you can have multiple channels to hold discussions. Those channels are public to everyone you have on the team so you can't have some that are private and some open to everyone.

Security on individual channels is coming next year.

When combined with OneDrive and SharePoint, we've found teams to be a useful app for allowing collaboration on projects and events. We don't ""live"" in it by any stretch but it has allowed us to take silos of data files & folders and consolidate them into one location. I'm sure we'll grow into more usage. OneNote has also been very helpful to our team for projects. We haven't extended it to clients at this point.