Microsoft Teams: What Do You Know?

I've been asked to help our IT department roll out Microsoft Teams (I'm an editor, not an IT guy). I'll be evangelizing, training, and creating company-specific documentation (we can't use all of Teams' features due to incompatibility with certain existing IT infrastructure [Cisco, primarily]).

Care to share a little about your experience with either rolling teams out to an organization or, if you're a user, what some of the things that you struggled with, or still struggle with, were/are? One of the biggest goals we're hoping to achieve is a decrease in email. We're also hoping to be able to consolidate most project-specific communication to Teams. Do these goals seem realistic to you?

I'd be grateful for your impressions, even if short, like, "Hated it, now love it," or "Hated it, still hate it, because [dumb thing that's dumb]."

Thanks!

You've got mail

We use it now.  I liked the simplicity of Skype better but the document share feature is nice

In reply to No Time :

Thanks! You've got mail.

It's an adjustment, but mostly for the better. Doc sharing is better than sharepoint, by far. The video calling (using computer audio, there are options to use phones but I just use my bluetooth headset connected to my laptop instead of my phone) and screen sharing are really nice. If you get it integrated with outlook, when you schedule a meeting in outlook you just hit the 'teams call' button that automatically creates a dial in line and links and blah blah blah and add it all to the meeting invite - awesome. 

The chat is like any other chat. 

The navigation is weird. I'd still like to see a hierarchy or something that explains the vertical subgroups on the left side and the horizontal 'tabs' on the right side. For someone who is used to something like a file explorer it would be nice to be able to browse like that. 

I don't KNOW, but I'm pretty sure you'd lose a lot of valuable functionality if you don't have outlook or other MS products to work with it. 

Train, train, train, train. It is a good tool. 

I know that I'm ignoring the messages I get about it. I was dragged into the E36 M3show that is our Slack network, I don't need another mountain of nonsense to wade through all day instead of getting anything productive done.

I agree with all of what Robbie said. We have been leaning into it more and more over the last 2 years at work and it's very functional. but not particularly intuitive for me. Sounds like next year our entire phone system will be migrated into Teams. Can't say I'm excited about it right now, but it will probably be fine.

I deployed it to 30+ offices and 1000 employees.   They adapted to it very quickly

We have it, but I don't use it. 

For task tracking, I preferred the much for straight forward interface of Trello. But then we realized we probably shouldn't be using it. I'm now going back to using my own personal Confluence page and the handy dry erase board on the wall next to me in my home office.

For communication, meetings/chat/etc, we use Slack.

As a user, it's really a slack knockoff layered on top of SharePoint.  It's about 1000 times better than sharepoint, for reference.  The video & audio quality is quite a bit better than Skype for Business.

The biggest thing I see from the rollout in our company is to be very structured about setting up the teams themselves and who is a member of what team, and about setting up appropriate channels inside of it.

For example, if you have a document that is owned by the marketing team but needs to be accessible to everyone in the company, make sure that the marketing team's file structure is organized in such a way that people can figure out where it is.  Typical communications & locations stuff, but you have a chance now to put some structure to it!

Like a forum or slack, it's probably good to have a channel for non-team-specific stuff.  We have a "For sale/recommendation" channel, various hobby-group channels and a generic "chatter" channel.  That keeps those conversations out of the real ones and allows you to unsubscribe to notifications. 

WonkoTheSane (Forum Supporter) said:

It's about 1000 times better than sharepoint, for reference.   

How do we effectively quantify 1000x better than a hot, flaming pile of poo? 

z31maniac said:

WonkoTheSane (Forum Supporter) said:

It's about 1000 times better than sharepoint, for reference.   

How do we effectively quantify 1000x better than a hot, flaming pile of poo? 

Well, you can actually use it, to start with... :)

z31maniac said:

WonkoTheSane (Forum Supporter) said:

It's about 1000 times better than sharepoint, for reference.   

How do we effectively quantify 1000x better than a hot, flaming pile of poo? 

That was my first thought.  1000 x Zero is still Zero 

We've used it for a few years now and I generally really like it. As others have said, the video call quality is really good, and they now offer virtual backgrounds/background blur capability which is nice since we are mostly WFH.

You can create secured, invite-only teams or channels which is good if you have a project that is only for some eyes, not all. The hierarchy is that your whole org has access to Teams-the-app, then you create lowercase-T teams and each team can have one or many channels. We will create a team for a certain client we're working with, then create channels for each stream of work we have people completing. That keeps files/chat separate and helps with security. We also have a whole-office team with some channels that anyone can access (general, inclusion & diversity, events, travel) for different chat and file sharing.

It is easy to be added to a LOT of teams and channels which can be overwhelming. You can hide teams if you need access but infrequently, or you can Pin channels to the top of your list if you use those often (i.e. the project you're on this month). 

File sharing is SharePoint but prettier. It works well 90% of the time. We have had some odd issues with a lot of users accessing one file and updates not saving back to SP properly. Solution seems to be backing out and working two or three at a time, max. It is really nice to open files either inside of Teams for brief edits, or in your desktop Office 365 apps for heavier work.

Also worth mentioning, the iOS app is awesome. You can do so much with it and it makes working out of literal-pocket very easy most of the time. Screen sharing works on iPhone/iPad. I've screen-shared a PowerPoint deck while video chatting all on my iPhone.

I'd want to know more about the environment you're moving from to be able to say how well it will serve you. I've been through implementations of Teams in two different companies now, and it's a good tool, but like any software solution it takes some work to integrate it into your user workflow. 

z31maniac said:

WonkoTheSane (Forum Supporter) said:

It's about 1000 times better than sharepoint, for reference.   

How do we effectively quantify 1000x better than a hot, flaming pile of poo? 

The E36 M3's not on fire.

I haven't been real impressed by Teams, but at least it's fairly secure.

Mezzanine said:

I'd want to know more about the environment you're moving from to be able to say how well it will serve you. I've been through implementations of Teams in two different companies now, and it's a good tool, but like any software solution it takes some work to integrate it into your user workflow. 

Environmental consulting firm, ~400 staff, 20+ offices. We primarily clean up contaminated sediments, from (scientists) initially determining the nature/extent of contamination, to, often years later, (engineers) creating/implementing a cleanup design. We're mostly on network servers, and for projects requiring coauthoring or external sharing/collaboration, we're still on SharePoint 2013; users also have individual OneDrive accounts.

Basically, our product is written deliverables, everything from 1-pp memos to +1,000-pp monsters that take a decade to finalize. Work on these docs is extremely collaborative, with 2 to 40+ authors, and is mostly managed via email by a project manager; the team is kept apprised by being cc'd to death, and links to docs/folders on a server are emailed around (or, frustratingly, a doc is attached to an email, then sent from one author to the next).

Scheduling usually consists of Excel-based calendars passed around; no one knows about kanban/scrum/agile, or the like.

FWIW, when we work with storage- or document-related IT vendors, they often fail to grasp that we don't often need to repeatedly access and/or re-use old docs -- we spend most of our time creating new ones. The other notable thing is, along with people who are reasonably comfortable with tech, we have, for example, a scientist with a PhD who recently asked what a blog is, and another staff person who recently asked where to find our LinkedIn page. So, yeah, a broad range of users.

Thanks!

Thanks to all of you for sharing your impressions and experience, especially No Time, who went above and beyond -- I appreciate it! 

Hans, your environment is great for Teams. The thing that stood out the most is the constant email and CC'ing. Teams for collaborating on documents is pretty great because you can create a channel specifically for one client or project to make communicating with your coworkers about that specific project a little cleaner. Basically instead of emailing and CC'ing everyone, you just put your comments into that specific channel chat, and @mention the people that need to specifically respond or act. As Brake L8 said, be careful in how you configure your team hierarchy so it doesn't become overwhelming trying to find the right channel. 

Technically speaking, Teams uses a SharePoint backend for file management (as Brake L8 said). Since you're already in a SharePoint environment, it will take a little consideration on how you're going to archive your existing space. Transitioning away from SharePoint will be painful for many of your users, so decide whether you're going to run both parallel or if you're going to rip the bandage off and set the old environment to read only.

Speaking of archiving: Teams has configuration options around retention. You need to have a strong policy around document retention and e-discovery that is broad enough to include Teams messages. All too often doc retention policies cover traditional things like email, but don't mention anything about collaborative platforms with messaging functions like Teams. Since you described multiple year projects, I expect you'll have a DEEP archive and retention. 

Regarding scheduling: lots of the tricks you may have used in SharePoint have similar functionality in Teams. If you have an Excel calendar that's hosted, you can embed it directly in Teams so it is a little easier to consume. 

Finally, the Teams plugins: from a project management perspective, there are some native tools in Teams to do some very basic task assignment. There's also a plugin for literally every PM tool on the block: Asana, SmartSheet, Trello, whatever. Plugins allow you to embed functionality into Teams, so it's a "all in one place" sort of experience. 

Is your company already using Office 365? If not, some of the functionality is limited. Most of the collaborative stuff is the same, but the project management aspect of having meetings run out of Teams with all the meeting notes and everything in one place is limited without mailboxes synced. 

It's an over bloated, non-user friendly piece of crap. Video conferencing audio is usually terrible, their chat functions do not lust things linearly as you would expect and our implementation would require me to follow 40 different individual "teams" to get all the needed information. 

But other than that its a perfectly fine platform. 

You can dump in lots of fun backgrounds so you aren't on camera in your garage.   There are also a pile of editable GIF's and Memes that are fun/dangerous in a work environment.  For IM I preferred Skype but otherwise it has a lot more features and the calls are much more stable.

I love it. Compared to Skype, it is a huge improvement. It is in the Microsoft universe, so it ties into everything really well, making it easy to share and collaborate. Audio and video are just fine, no better or worse than other platforms. Unlike GotoMeetings, it does not require an update and an install of software every time you use it. Our teams have really liked it because it is so user-friendly and familiar to Windows users. They keep rolling out new features as well. Sure, there are things I would change, but overall we have found it to be a powerful business tool for large organizations.

Here is a video series we put out to help move to MS Teams.

Love it as well. We left Slack for Teams. The fact that you can quickly go from text to video chat is slick–it’s like stopping at someone's office. Like others have said, audio and video quality have been fine. 

My employer rolled out teams globally earlier this year.  Tens of thousands of employees.  Historically we used Webex for Conf Calls, and some internal software for doc management, also used Shareponit, etc.

I was a bit apprehensive, as I didn't want to give up my Webex account I'd had for years.  While it took some getting used to, I find the conf calling features, and chat features to work well.  

A short list of Pros (at least with how our system is configured):

1. While IT has to set-up the initial Team, I as owner, can add user delete user, add channels, etc. without IT support.  Rather than submit a ticket, and wait for overseas IT support to fill it, I can add a user to one of my Teams in about 10 seconds.  By the time it took me to navigate the help desk menu system, I can be done.

2. It's great having the ability to add exterior users (Teams calls them Guests) to my teams.  For us, that's generally clients, or subcontractors.  And the ability to chat with those Guests is great.  We couldn't do that with Skype (how it was configured).  I can also give Guests access to certain "channels" in my team.  I generally segregated my channels into "Public (which technically isn't public just public to the Team members), Internal (company employees) only, and PM Private (my private space).

3.  I find the chat, audio chat, and video chat features to work well.  The background blur feature is nice in a WFH world.  I can be driving an F1 car one day, sailing the next. I haven't had any issues with audio or video quality.  And the variety of backgrounds creates some team building conversations.

4.  The integration with Outlook is nice.  A simple click to add Teams info to a meeting invite. I also like when I'm doing notes (in OneNote in Teams), I can click a button and get all the meeting info imported into the note (name, time, date, meeting attendees, etc)

5.  The automatic back-up features are nice.  I already had one new to Teams person try to get fancy by syncing it directly to the Windows Explorer, so it kind of shows up as Network Drive (not the right term).  Similar to Sharepoint.  They sync'd a number of folders, and then just decided to delete the folders they didn't end up wanting, not realizing that it was deleting the files in Teams as well.

76  The history feature is nice, as it's difficult for employees to do the I'm working on it thing.  I can tell who's been in it, when they were in a file, etc. 

Cons:

1.  People working in the same file at the same time is functional but seriously quirky.  Ie, if you two or three people are in the same Excel file.  While the feature is awesome for some applications, it can be quirky.

2. I find myself almost always using the "open in desktop application" button, for all Excel and Word files, unless I'm only popping in to view something.  Any serious editing is easier in the full application.

3. Not Teams fault, but I have it on my laptop, Ipad, phone, etc.  With the cause barrage of chat popups, it sounds like machine gun fire between all the devices all the time. I know I can fix that.

4.  I haven't found a good way to do true Document Management, Revision Control, Transmittals, etc. yet within Teams.  Sure you can do it all manually with separate folders, etc., but not in the same controlled way as our traditional (but ancient) document management software.

5  I find the presentation (display my screen) feature to be a little less user friendly then webex, but that may just be how many years I used it.

In reply to Mezzanine :

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Craig -- I appreciate it. Yes, we're on Office 365. Our SharePoint 2013 stuff is ancient, so I'm not sure people will miss it. I don't think we've figured out retention policies and discovery elements, so that's something to talk about -- thanks for mentioning it.

In reply to wake74 :

Wow -- several virtual beers to you for the full response. This is super helpful!

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Actually, a round of virtual beers to everyone on this thread. I'm having to show people how to use this tool, but not having actual experience myself and not knowing which of MS's claims are legit and which are actually a PITA is a bit stressful: I don't want to be selling this thing to folks, only to have them come back later and say, "Hey, you said this thing's great; I tried it and I think you're wrong -- it's a piece of E36 M3."