Get the most out of Microsoft Teams  

Once you have rolled out Microsoft Teams for your organization, what’s next?  

Provide your users with the information they need – Make any announcements necessary to communicate the availability of Teams, and helpful tips/tricks to adopt it.  Microsoft provides a helpful Customer Success Kit and other adoption resources, found here. 

Have your users download the Microsoft Teams mobile app – That’s it, that’s the whole bullet. 

Create Org-wide, Departmental & Collaborative Teams – Microsoft’s definition of a team: 

A collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization. 

• Teams can be created to be private to only invited users. 
• Teams can also be created to be public and open, and anyone within the organization can join.  

A team is designed to bring together a group of people who work closely to get things done.  Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations).  Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.  Teams and channels overview. 

Optimize virtual meetings in Teams – You’ll likely find your organization wanting to utilize Teams for virtual meetings right away.  While Teams comes well-equipped out of the box, there are policies and configurations required to enable key virtual meetings capabilities such as Audio Conferencing, Desktop (Screen) sharing, meeting recording, etc. 

One of the best additions to roll out is the Outlook add-in, allowing you to create Teams meetings through your Outlook calendar. 

These and other optimization guides & ideas are found here. 

Explore App Integrations & App templates – With Microsoft Teams you can integrate Apps right into your Team, Channels & Chats; allowing you to share services and content to increase productivity and encourage collaboration.   

Apps can either be existing services (i.e. Planner, PowerPoint, Word, etc.), Community-driven creations (Open-source App templates), or your own development.   

An easy App to use immediately is Planner – providing your Teams with a simple project tracking Kanban board.  

Once your organization adopts Microsoft Teams, you’ve likely begun (likely without realizing!) a never-ending continuous improvement cycle. 

While the above are some great and relatively easy ideas for incremental enhancements, even more important may be your governance and your approach to security with Teams moving forward.

But that’s for another Blog….