Hello everyone!

This is the second part of our E-Visor Teams App Basic productivity series and today we want to make sure you do not miss a critical topic: how we can help you and your organization get the most out of Microsoft Teams by leveraging our “My Team” and “My Office 365” E-Visor applications sections.

We are just a few months away from July 31, 2021, which is when Microsoft Skype for Business Online will be retired. Also, due to the pandemic, and (more importantly) looking towards the future of remote work/flexible work, many organizations have users that leverage as many kinds of collaboration tools as possible to be more productive. I have seen all kinds of scenarios (I want to highlight this is just a quick view of what we have found in hundreds of Microsoft Teams deployments and they may or not may reflect your organization’s scenario; however, pay attention to the Challenge part, which is what we want you to consider and see how we approach it with our app):

Skype Lovers

• Users who refuse the change and still use Skype for meetings. Maybe they are slowly using Teams with a limited feature set, such as for IM, not necessarily as a full collaboration (meetings/Platform) solution
   

Challenge: There is less time to get people up to speed in a replacement solution. We firmly believe that #MicrosoftTeams is the best option for customers as it provides much more than meetings and calling capabilities and, as we are running out of time until Skype sunsets, we will show you soon how we simplify all those familiar capabilities + new ones in a easy user experience in our app (more details below)

My Personal Choice

• Organization that allows users to leverage “free” or paid individual services. This seems flexible up to the point that business details /others may fall into a shadow IT situation where business data is used and managed under a user subscription, which might not be what the organization would prefer or should allow due to regulatory, compliance, and privacy reasons
  
  
• Challenge: While it seems simple, this will make users learn, install, and configure multiple add-ons to the Outlook client, etc. that can complicate the process of having a consistent place where documents, notes, recordings, and information beyond the ones discussed in a meeting exist to keep up in an effective collaboration experience. Unfortunately, sooner or later, this can lead to chaos 
  
  

Pick and choose

• Organization that provides a “couple” of options to users so they can choose from the approved list of services. This seems to provide a bit more of an organizational collaboration/governance approach
  
  
• Challenge: While there may be valid reasons for using multiple tools, we see that more as an exception, in most cases, for a limited number of users with specific needs and not as a corporatewide strategy.  The biggest challenge, beyond the functional aspect, is how to justify duplicate tool costs on everything, including software, end-user education, support and maintenance, etc. Yes, cloud services help you save money but there is no “free lunch” here. Our approach is simple: if your collaboration platform is Office 365, then for that and many other reasons, Microsoft Teams can provide you much more than chat and calling. Organizations should not limit their use of Teams to that, as the product has evolved dramatically in technical and inclusive features. You may think you know everything that Teams can offer, but there are SO MANY new features every month.

Let’s do Teams, and lets learn on the go, here we go!:

• An organization that embraced Microsoft Teams but might not necessarily have the training and change management process in place and users start working with the product right away
  
  
• Challenge: Here we are not judging; it is just a fact that the past year and a few months have been so rough/ unexpected and we have seen so many organizations jumping into Teams and as they grow they may have an unnecessary growth in Teams channels and apps. That shows they are eager to go beyond chat, but there is still room to optimize core functionality, including IM/Calls, meetings, and apps. As many of these capabilities are open for the user to play with out of the box, users may just have too many capabilities that may be redundant. We believe that even if you already started using Teams, change management is critical and can provide some guidance and best practices. See how the E-Visor app can be used as the starting point to get users moving beyond Teams 101!

Let’s do Teams, But let’s get everything sorted out first (design, configuration, apps, training curriculum), prior to any formal transition:

• Organization that embraced Microsoft Teams but might not necessarily have the training and change management process in place and is looking to get users incrementally using the product and the usage progress is growing slowly. Progress may be impacted as the organization adopts remote work
  
  
• Challenge While it is fantastic to plan for a product migration and, in fact, many organizations had that “on the horizon”, we never expected so many new variables, including remote/hybrid work becoming a permanent model. We are here for you and our app will help you simplify and achieve those quick wins to get existing and new users proficient in collaborating with others using Teams.
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Let’s take a look!