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Hi all,

My MD came to us in IT and asked us to investigate using Teams as a collaboration tool.

So we spent a few days googling / testing things and for the life of my I can’t see a reason to use Teams. Its like outlook and whatapp had a baby thats not as good as either of its parents.

Am I missing some functionality?

Cheers!

32 Spice ups
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Teams will ultimately replace Skype for Business and has more collaboration functionality. It is more than just a chat app.

The ability to create teams, channels, and integration with other Office 365 products - SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, etc. as well as integration with 3rd party products make it much more functional than Skype for Business.

We moved a pilot group to Teams last year before moving the entire company earlier this and user adoption has been great. The individual groups/teams can tailor their Teams workspace as they see fit.

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It’s like a much better Skype for Business. The major idea is collaboration with whoever you need in a moment. Group calls, group-whiteboarding, file-sharing/editing, PSTN calling, etc.

There’s a lot of value there! The key is to set up some new teams for your people. Maybe start with your department. It’s one of those things you just need to try and experiment with.

My organization is definitely seeing good value come of this. Adoption is growing and people are excited about its feature-set.

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In a nutshell its almost like a dash board that brings skype / one drive / sharepoint / planner /into one location as as mentioned it will eventually replace skype, its not for everyone but to be honest yu only really see the benefit when you start using it, however i do feel this lacks some admin controls out there.

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I had a similar thought; my understanding was that it was to compete directly with things like Slack. It’s grown in features quite a bit from where it started though, and as others have mentioned, it will be replacing Skype for Business in the long run. It’s integration with the newer Office 365 Groups is really good: OneNote, files, emails, chats all in one location.

We’re hoping to make a push towards the end of this year/early next year to get our developers off Slack and into Teams since we’re already invested in O365.

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It works best if you have a large group. We’re a small company and for a team of 2 or 3 it’s difficult to navigate and there are other ways you can do the same thing. For us, MS Planner which is part of O365 works better. You can go to tasks.office.com if it’s not part of your menu. We share files, emails, and timelines. Teams is best for spread out workgroups.

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While there is much more functionality in Teams, I myself am struggling to justify the switch to Teams and burden it will put on the users. They are perfectly happy with Skype for Business and the interface is just so much larger and comprehensive.

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The motivation for Slack and Teams is the elimination of email as the main communications channel for internal business, as I understand it.

Staff turnover in Silicon Valley is high, and so many people might be at a company for only two or three years. With email, you had information about project status, design, and decision making spread out in various email threads … only a fraction of a team was involved in any particular thread and when a new person came on board, that person would serendipitously discover the existence of these bits of information and have to ask someone privy to the thread to forward it to him. This would happen again and again one person left and someone came in to take his place.

Slack solved this problem by centering communication around group chat. These chats had to have a narrow enough focus that amount of data the user had to digest was manageable - so it is organized around teams and/or individual topics or projects. When a new person comes in, he gets added to the team and then immediately gets access to all the communications and files associated with that team or project or topic.

The added advantage to this approach is that you can have ‘lightweight’ channels that get created and discarded in a haphazard manner … every user gets the ability to create a whatever he feels he needs at the time and archive it when there is no longer any interest in it. It kind of fits the fast-paced, less-planning startup company mindset.

That is what I understand from reading some of the background material around Microsoft Teams and Slack.

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It keeps the Teams group employed at Microsoft

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I’ll echo the idea that it provides a single application to access all your other Office 365 stuff in one place - really good for mobile.

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Many conversations happen in email that really don’t belong there. Teams provides persistent chat centered around groups and projects. Even people who are later added to a team can view and search the entire team chat. I can also easily access my IT Department KB articles and other important documents inside Teams. You can even do basic editing of these documents within the Teams desktop apps. Teams mobile apps are much better than Skype for Business mobile apps (plus SfB is going away finally).
Teams is meant to be an entire virtual workspace, where you can find pretty much everything you need. You may not need all the features, but if you do in the future, they’ll be there. (I’m intrigued by the future integration of Office 365 Phone System with Teams, for example.)

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Personally, I believe that email is becoming a useless tool in our lives since its mere existence seems to be there for idiots to try and gain access to your passwords and personal log in details in order for them to spoof your emails and gain access to money in transit from customer to supplier.

I think that Teams is a way to keep things focussed whilst tracking tasks and keeping loosely connected information together in a single space.

We are in a transition period moving away from email, certainly within my teams, and I think it’s of great benefit.

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As mentioned above:

  • full Skype for Business functionality - so easy to communicate including Chat (so instant - not the email overhead)

  • excellent integration with OneNote

  • sharing files

Give it a go! - I suggest with a small team first.

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Agree with this.

It is not for everyone, but in my current workplace it is being rolled out and many departments are taking it up as their main communications and collaboration tool.

I don’t mind it just wish my team would use it more, but we are big fans of OneNote and mainly use Skype for Business.

I would say give it a go and try with a small team or even with the management, works great as a way to gather notes and organise meeting and agendas.

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And helps push file shares into the MS cloud.

I’m not opposed to it and am 90% done with the backend transition setup, I look forward to moving my S4B infrastructure off my local servers and leveraging O365 for this service.
we’ll be using direct routing (for now) and will keep our PSTN service on prem. I’m stoked

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We (as a department) were all using GroupMe for fast chatting purposes and we’ve recently made the switch to Teams. My only complaint is despite following specific channels, the app seems to pick and choose when it notifies us. We’re all constantly missing important messages because we’re not being alerted that we’ve received one.

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Full disclosure - Our company is a MS Silver Partner for Content and Collaboration. I am an MCSE Productivity and have a strong focus on Sharepoint and Office 365 Consulting
“Its like outlook and whatapp had a Baby…” that’s pretty good :slight_smile: Seriously though: We’ve deployed Teams for more than a year now, for different customers’ various departments, and we use it for internal communications as well. Overall, I would say the success rate is at about 80%, meaning that in 8 out of 10 deployments, it has actually proven useful to people’s everyday work. In those deployments where it has not, people just stopped using it and continued on with Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. In those cases where it is useful, I see rapid and painless adoption (especially by the under-40 set), with people using it for internal team chats (incl. video), file-sharing/collaboration (like on spreadsheets that 5 people have input on), and basic task/project planning.
Using my own case as an example, I work with a couple of highly reading-averse C-Suite executives. The channel-organized chat format in Teams makes it way easier for them to keep track of specific conversations and the associated action items than if they had to follow the conversation in their overstuffed email inboxes (or in WhatsApp). For me in project management, it’s great to be able to link to my MS-Project tracking, collaborate on associated docs and spreadsheets, even enter tasks for the C-Suite when I need a specific decision from them. Having all the information in a Teams channel also saves us writing an agenda for the weekly status meeting - we can just refer to the open items and tasks in Teams/Planner, reference docs in SharePoint and schedules in Project Online. It’s probably the most efficient, effective and integrated content and collaboration eco-system that I have worked with over the past 20 years. YMMV…

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Teams does so much… but one of the features I like best…

We allow managers to create their own teams, and then create shares (file sections) which they (not IT) manage. The users then click “Open in Sharepoint” and then once in sharepoint they click sync. Now they will have a Cloud Share that works much like a traditional file share, that will sync files to their computer as they need them. All they need is an internet connection. Gone are the days of the call to IT, “I need a share and could you give these people access to it?” And this is only one of the many useful features of Teams. It has quickly become the heart of collaboration here…

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I’ve found Teams helpful for collaborations however it’s not so helpful if you have a lot of folks who either never use it/prefer email or some other mode of communicating so personally, that’s been my biggest issue with it. If it’s replacing three other modes of communication, then it’s nice. If it’s just adding another, then not so much.

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We are heavily relying on the Teams features. I might say searching history in Teams chat requires some improvement.

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