Become a Microsoft Teams Superhero | Worksighted NXT Webinar
Ryan:
All right everyone, let’s just jump into this. My name is Ryan Wenk. I’m on the sales and marketing team here at Worksighted. But more importantly, I was and am very involved in the rollout of Microsoft Teams here at Worksighted, and the ongoing strategy and everything we do around it. That’s why I’m relevant to this conversation today. I might not be on these webinars in the future, but happy to be here now. Sitting next to me is my coworker, Adam.
Ryan:
Adam, tell them a little bit about yourself.
Adam:
My name is Adam. I’ve been at Worksighted for eight years now. I started in engineering and now the Technology Vertical Leader. I’ve worked with a lot of organizations around Teams and collaboration changes for their environment.
Ryan:
Great, before we jump into the meat of our presentation and what we want to talk about today, just a couple of things around housekeeping. There’s a chat feature, a Q&A feature within the Microsoft Teams webinar interface. Feel free to use that at any time, this is not your classic webinar. Becca, who is standing behind the camera over there, and is my teammate, will be giving us questions and pausing us if we need to stop and answer anything. Feel free to drop any questions you have in there. If we don’t get to it right away, we promise we’ll address everything by the end of the webinar.
Ryan:
What is Worksighted NXT? I think people, our clients, and some people who know Worksighted have probably seen Worksighted NXT around, but really what it is, is our branding around our events, around our content, and around our webinars that really focus on what’s next in IT, what’s next in technology, and how to really focus on using technology for your business, to the best of your advantage.
Ryan:
In the future, we’ll be doing these monthly webinars. You’ll see our blog continuing to put out content, so just make sure you follow along if you’re interested in anything else.
Adam:
Make sure to submit any ideas you have for content that you’d like to see. We really want to engage with the community and make sure what we’re producing relevant content and cover anything that would be.
Ryan:
Let’s just jump into it. Everyone’s here for one reason, and that’s because they wanted to learn more about Microsoft Teams. How to become a Microsoft Teams superhero. I think what’s interesting is a lot of people, if you don’t have Microsoft Teams, or you already have it but you’re not really sure how to use it, the one question is how do you know if it’s right for you? It’s one thing to just have this tool on your laptop, on your phone that has all these features, but how do you actually use it day to day? That’s what we’re going to focus on today, and that’s what Adam is really going to help us dive into the different features and the use cases of Microsoft Teams. Let’s just jump into it, the first thing right now is really adoption, and is Microsoft Teams right for your organization.
Adam:
That’s a good question. That’s one of the key things that we need to answer whenever there’s a new tool available, is this the right tool for us, will this bring benefit? Are users going to adopt this and is it actually going to improve people’s lives? Sometimes when we have a lot of new tools it can feel a little bit about having a hammer and looking for a nail. We want to make sure that it’s a good fit.
Adam:
Really there’s two main use cases that I find for Microsoft Teams. It’s a new product within the Microsoft Team Office 365 Cloud platform. It’s really centered around the first use case being chat and meetings. Chat has, and Meetings have, come into Teams because the Skype functionality has been rolled into Teams and Skype for Business is going to be decommissioned very quickly. It’s already scaling down. The second main use case is a little bit more confusing, because it’s also called Teams inside of Teams, but we will dive into that a little bit more.
Adam:
Some of the main functionality with the chat in Instant Message site is it’s very much like other applications that you’ve used, notably Skype for Business if you have used that. It’s a secure instant messaging platform for your organization that is built on the same enterprise, Cloud Platform is the rest of Office 365, so it’s secure. By adopting Teams for instant messaging, it can really help provide a resource for your users that can help prevent them from going around official channels and using things like Facebook Messenger in order to be able to collaborate with their team members. It’s a very real problem that we see happening.
Adam:
The Meetings functionality and the capabilities, they’re very similar to other web-based meeting platforms.
Ryan:
Like what?
Adam:
Webex, GoToMeeting
Ryan:
Zoom
Adam:
Zoom
Ryan:
Got it.
Adam:
It’s integrated, highly integrated, with the rest of the Office 365 platform. You can create meetings with internal, as well as external users that don’t have Teams right now.
Ryan:
So it’s pretty easy to use across the board.
Adam:
It’s pretty easy to use, and it’s also available to you right now if you’re already using Office 365 Cloud platform.
Ryan:
If it’s Chat and Meetings on the one end, what’s on the other side of it? What’s the other use case for people?
Adam:
Again, it gets to the heart of why Teams is called Teams. You can create these teams. It’s a thing that you can create within Teams that is something that you can create for functional units, for different departments within your organization, that gives them a place to collaborate with persistent chat, with file sharing, Planner, OneNote documents, external web services that are integrated, and much more.
Ryan:
Awesome. I think the real, what we really want to see here, and what we want to show everyone, is actually how some of these features work. Obviously for us, when we were rolling out Teams internally here at Worksighted, the big win for us was that everyone was already using Chat at Worksighted previously to using Teams. Once we got on board with using Microsoft Teams, everyone came over with Chat, and it was a simple transition. There really wasn’t much translation lost there. That was our big win, and it’s kind of interesting because we took that route versus taking, start with Microsoft Teams, let’s start with teams within marketing, product development, things like that.
Adam:
I find that the chat in Meetings functionality is typically useful for nearly all organizations, and again if you have Office 365 you can start using it today. One thing I want to note with our adoption is, when we switched from Skype for Business, which was a part of Office 365 previously, to Teams for chat and it significantly improved the user experience around chat. Skype for Business had some issues where if I was on my phone, as well as my laptop, sometimes the messages would only show up on one. Teams has been much more consistent and it really has become the go to way to get ahold of anyone quickly within Worksighted.
Ryan:
Teams is one of the fastest growing products out there. It’s definitely some, oh do we have a question? Oh, we have a question, we’ll stop talking and answer the question.
Adam:
You can, yes. The question is, “Can you use Teams across multiple organizations?” There’s a couple different ways that you can do that. One is that if you’re working another organization that does not have Office 365, you can actually create what are called BB guest accounts within your tenant, so they can actually log into your tenant of teams and interact with you inside of that. You have lots of permission controls and things like that as well.
Ryan:
If they get in, and you create a team and you allow them in, then their not part of your organization, then they have access to all of your files and things like that?
Adam:
Only what’s within the Teams, which we can talk a little bit more about that once we dive into that functionality.
Adam:
The other thing is you can create authorized, other organizations, that your organization can collaborate with. I can instant message directly with other people inside of other organizations, if it’s been allowed at an administrative level.
Ryan:
I think with the basics behind us and the understanding that there’s really two ways that companies go about adopting Teams, either using the Chat and Meetings features, or diving into the full on Teams and Channels features, why don’t we open up Microsoft Teams and show everyone our favorite features and how they can use these to their advantage on a day to day workload.
Feature Overview
Adam:
I’m going to share my screen, and in the meantime I wanted to make one point on the Teams functionality. What we find is that’s most useful for organizations and why you’d consider adopting that, is if you have a need for and an interaction between different team members. If your organizational approach is, avoid talking to your coworkers, nobody wants to interact with each other, and everybody can get their job done just fine, you’re not going to get a lot of value from it. It’s designed around enhancing and creating one place for people to collaborate.
Ryan:
For example, a really good use case for it is the fact that I work remotely in Marquette. Fun fact for anyone who didn’t know. The rest of my team is down state here in Holland, or over in Wixom. I really have no great ways of collaborating with them outside of Microsoft Teams. Honestly, we built most of our work flows and our daily processes around using Microsoft Teams at this point.
Adam:
I’m going to give into the interface of Teams right now. The first thing I want to start is a little high level overview. On the very far left here, we have a couple different sections, areas, that we can click into. The first one that I’m in right now is called Chat, and I’m going to go over that functionality. Here on the top we have the search bar, so I can search for people, chat messages, I can search for files and things that are inside of teams, etc. etc.
Ryan:
I think it’s worth noting right now that you’re using a demo account. The content that is within it is kind of light, but normally if you had been using Teams like myself for the last couple years-
Adam:
Correct.
Ryan:
If I was interacting with my teammate Sam, and I remembered I had a conversation with him, at one point in time where we mentioned something random, this search feature is very robust. It actually does find you what you need, unlike searching for random emails within Outlook or another tools.
Adam:
Right, if your inbox looks like mine it’s often a guessing game of which keywords do I need to enter to try to find that email that somebody sent. It’s often buried in dozens and dozens of other emails. Teams usually makes it a little easier to find that.
Ryan:
You don’t check email anyway.
Adam:
Let’s look at the Chat functionality here. This section here are recent chats that I’ve taken place in, and it’s going to show me all of the current chats that I’m in. If people have sent me a chat, they pop up here in bold, indicating it’s an unread one. I can also go into my contacts and have favorite contacts. I can create a contact group. Then there’s filtering capabilities as well.
Adam:
If I want to create a new chat, let’s say I want to send a message to Sam, who I haven’t chatted with before. Ignore the fact that it’s right there. I just hit tab or click down in the type a new message section and say, “hey, Sam, thanks for all the good work you do.”
Ryan:
Don’t lie to him.
Adam:
I want him to reply. He’s going to get this, just like you can see Rebecca has sent me, and it’s going to be bold. What’s awesome is the fact that this is cross platform as well, so if he has the app on his phone or on a mobile device, iOS or Android, he’ll see that chat. He can respond on his laptop, his desktop, or through the web client as well.
Ryan:
I actually really love that feature because there’s a lot of times that one of the two people in the conversation, so let’s say I’m at my desk, but maybe Sam’s out in the field or on the road somewhere, and I have to talk to him. If I give him a call through the desktop Microsoft Teams app, he can answer it on his phone and vice versa.
Ryan:
We had a question. In Chats, is there a way to see if a message was read or not?
Adam:
I don’t believe there is.
Ryan:
I don’t think there is. That’s a really great question whoever asked that. I don’t believe there actually is. It’s not a read receipt like with a iMessage or an iPhone. Normally you can just assume that if these people have their notifications turned on, if they have Teams open, that the chat will eventually filter back to their activity area, which will see that. No, there isn’t a read receipt or anything like that.
Adam:
We’ll verify that, and Sam can do some research on that topic and tell us if we’re wrong.
Ryan:
I’m willing to bet we’re not wrong.
Adam:
Couple things in here, now that I’m in this chat window. You can see Sam’s name is up top. Down here at this type a new message bar, we have formatting options. I can set delivery options, such as whether it’s an important message or urgent message. I can attach a file from my computer or from other locations. I can add an emoji. I can add a gif.
Ryan:
Hold on now here, the gif part is extremely important and people need to know that this is a very highly used feature with anyone who has Microsoft Teams. It is a selling point.
Adam:
If I want to search a specific topic, I can see if there’s appropriate gifs so I can send him
Ryan:
There’s our COO, Barry Rice.
Adam:
Barry Rice, yeah exactly.
Adam:
Stickers. I have not really used that one that much, but that’s kind of cool as well. I can schedule a meeting through this interface as well.
Ryan:
Let’s say you didn’t want to schedule a meeting within the conversation with Sam, because when you would schedule a meeting right now, or you would kickoff a meeting, it would happen right now, right?
Adam:
Yes, although there’s a few caveats to that. There’s a lot of robust Meeting functionality that we’ll jump into in the calendar section.
Adam:
Another thing that I can do is interact with other chats. You’ll note up here he had a little thumbs up on his one. If I hover over his chat, I can react to that. I can give it a thumbs up. I can laugh, surprise. You have to be mindful of the appropriate of the emojis, as well at times. Not in every environment would somebody necessarily be comfortable with getting a heart from their boss. You just have to be mindful of how those come across. You can save messages.
Ryan:
That’s a great feature.
Adam:
One thing that I want to mention is, if we go back up under his name. I can see files, so if we’ve shared files. If I go to Rebecca here for example. She’s posted and shared some content in there. If I go to files, I can see the files that we’ve previously shared within Chat. It’s a quick way to access those attachments.
Ryan:
If somebody sent a week ago, a file in the chat with you, you wouldn’t necessarily have to-
Adam:
I wouldn’t have to scroll up.
Ryan:
Right, exactly. You could go back to the files tab and actually see that file from where it was.
Adam:
You got it. If I go to organization, this isn’t as useful for us since I kind of know where everybody is.
Ryan:
Yeah, we’re in a smaller company, it’s not a huge selling point.
Adam:
For a larger organization, you can see who their manager is and how that-
Ryan:
Who reports to who…
Adam:
Who reports to who, exactly. Who their coworkers are. Sometimes if I’m having trouble getting ahold of somebody within a department, I could reach out to someone else within their department. Activity if I’ve been in Teams together.
Adam:
Another area I want to touch on is up here on the left, or on the very far right corner we have video call, audio call, and share my screen. Right from within this chat window, I can do all of those things. I could initiate an audio call, I can initiate a video call, and I can share my screen with them.
Adam:
Another cool feature is I can add other people. If I wanted to do a group chat, I could add Ryan.
Ryan:
This is really helpful, because if you’re having a conversation one on one with somebody and then say, “Hey, have you talked to Becca?” about whatever you’re talking about. Rather than doing a separate chat, or going and finding her and asking her, you just add her to the conversation and you knock out whatever it is right away.
Adam:
Absolutely. This is a really widely used feature within Worksighted. What’s really awesome is you can click this little pencil up here, and you can name it. I can just add a name to this group chat, and now if I want to reference that. Let’s say I have lots of chat windows, or chat sections, under recent under my tenant. If I want to type in here, “awesomeness” I can pull up that group chat quickly.
Ryan:
That’s perfect.
Adam:
The same thing here, I can see the conversation. I can files. I can interact with all those in the ways. If I want to initiate a group call, I can do that from right within here as well.
Ryan:
You mention the calls. You mention that within this one chat, you can instantly start a meeting. You can instantly start a call. But again, what if you didn’t need to instantly do it? Do you have to go to outlook?
Adam:
Schedule it out.
Ryan:
Schedule a meeting still or are you able to do it within the interface?
Adam:
You can do it within this interface, as well as within Outlook. I’m going to show you what it looks like within Teams. If I click on the calendar section on the left, then I’m going to see my calendar that’s integrated with Outlook. If mine was showing up here, it would be a mess and full of things. In this instance, we just have a few sections, few items that we’ve done here.
Adam:
Let’s say that I want to create a meeting that’s scheduled out, and I want to add a few people from within the organization. I can add a title in here. I add a title and then over here on the right I’m going to invite people. I’m going to pick Becca and then I’m going to pick Ryan. What it’s telling me right now is, if you look under the attendee names, it’s busy. If I go over here, on the left, there’s the time slot that it defaulted to. It’s already showing me some available times that work for the three of us. If I want to, I can click in the scheduling system.
Adam:
If I want to meet in a room, one of our conference rooms here, I can look and see what room is free at that time slot. I’m going to say the peacock. Then I’m going to go into the scheduling assistant, and I’m going to look and see, is there a time slot that’s available for all of us today? I can click right in here, and it shows that everybody’s free. I hit schedule, and now that meeting is being created.
Ryan:
That’s awesome. I don’t know about anyone watching, but this to me is a huge selling point. Just being able to keep email within Outlook, and handle everything else within this tool. To handle scheduling, all of those things, it’s just honestly impressive that it’s possible at this day in age.
Adam:
They’ve really integrated a lot of functionality. One of the points here that I want to show is that essentially, this is very similar to what the email that the other participants will get looks like. They’ll get a join Microsoft Teams meeting here. One question you might ask is, “What if you don’t want to do an online meeting, but you want to have a phone number that people can call in on?” For example, under my account, if I send you an invite, it will have a phone number attached. That’s just a very small add-on license on a user by user basis.
Ryan:
Okay, awesome. I think that we’ve covered the chat piece of this, and the calendar piece. Which honestly are probably the most familiar to people, because those are features that you’ve been using in other tools. Outlook, Skype for Business, any other tools, for a long time. If you’re not, than you probably should be using Calendar and Chat. We can help you with that. Why don’t we move to the actual meat of this presentation, which is around Teams.
Adam:
This is really the newer functionality, and that’s under the Teams section here. So again, I’m within the Microsoft Teams desktop application. Although, the interface if I was on the web version of this would be very, very similar. Within the Microsoft Teams application, I select the teams tab. Then over here on the left, I now have different teams that have been created that I’m a member of. You’ll note that there’s two of them. There’s All Company and there’s Product Development.
Adam:
What we call these sections under that are called channels. This Product Development has a general channel, a research and development channel, for example. Those are different conversations and things that are within in. If I stay in this general channel, I’m going to go over to the right area. You can see that there’s a conversations tab. There’s a files tab, wiki, widget design ideas, these are tabs that have been added on. These first ones are standard. Down here it looks very similar to chat, but this is a persistent chat.
Ryan:
What does that mean?
Adam:
It means that this is embedded inside of this channel. If you add someone new to that team, for example, they’ll be able to go back and see that history of chat.
Ryan:
I believe you get the option of showing them the last 24 hours, a longer period of time, or none if you didn’t want somebody to see. It does give you that option when adding people.
Adam:
There’s a lot of administrative capabilities around controlling access to these, and who’s authorized. We’ll definitely get into that more in a separate webinar.
Ryan:
Okay, why don’t we just start with these two teams on the side here. Just to clarify, teams and channels.
Adam:
Team is a thing that you create and within teams you create channels.
Ryan:
Being on the marketing team, I would in theory have a marketing team. Within that the channels would represent topics, conversations, initiatives that we’re working on?
Adam:
Anything that logically makes sense to that group that you’re creating, to divide the content. And maybe you start with a single channel. You don’t necessarily need a whole bunch of different channels. One key reason why you might have different channels is around the files and breaking out that. I’m going to go into a little bit of that here.
Adam:
Couple quick notes here. I can reply. I can also see over here that there’s new messages, so I can click on that. Then I can click reply and I can also add a specific… by just clicking at, and then I can pick someone. He’ll receive notification that I’ve mentioned him on this, if he’s a member of that. I can also reply to it with similar thins like emojis, gifs, and more.
Ryan:
This is very helpful, just to specifically call people out and say, “hey, you, look at this.”
Adam:
Yeah, exactly. Looks like we have a question.
Adam:
It would show up as an invite. It would show up on the calendar. The question is, if I send a meeting from within Teams, would it show up on the invitees calendars? The answer is yes, but they won’t have accepted it yet. Just like any other calendar invite, if I add you to it and I invite you, you can decline it. You can accept it, request a different time, or add a maybe and give a reason or not. It’s just like any other Outlook meeting invite at that point.
Ryan:
Assuming that that person doesn’t have Teams, right?
Adam:
Correct. They can interact with it within Teams, or they can interact within their Outlook. Do you want to know, I’m not going to show it right now, but within my Outlook, it adds a Teams plugin, so when I create a meeting inside of Outlook just like any other meeting, I can click on add teams meeting and it will add that content within it as well.
Adam:
Now let’s go into the files area. Up here on the top I clicked on files. These are specifically files that were added to this channel that may have been added within the conversation, or they may have been uploaded directly in here. Something that is important to note is that there are other back end content things that are created when you create a team. There’s a SharePoint site, that is the under pinnings of the team. This is SharePoint file storage, which adds a lot of capabilities of those of you that may have use. SharePoint has lots of content management, a lot of information rights management, and other capabilities.
Adam:
You can also sync this down, and share from here as well. I can click “get link”. I can share this with someone else externally. Depending on the settings my administrator has added here, I can add new. I can create a folder, for example. This is a way that I can collaborate with people on these different files. Something to note is that, since they’re being stored with an Office 365 Cloud storage, I can edit them within Teams. I can edit it in a browser. I can edit it in my desktop app, if I have Office 2016 or Office 365 installed. I can collaborate simultaneously with other people. Because it’s stored in Cloud storage, auto save is enabled with the newest versions of Office. I can do simultaneous editing of these files with other users in my organization.
Ryan:
That’s a really great feature. It really eliminates the whole, “I’m not getting the most up to date document, or I’m not seeing the most up to date document. So and so didn’t save it in Dropbox or save it in Google Drive.
Adam:
It’s really useful for when you’re drafting and working on documents with other people. But what we’re starting to see is organization move away from a network share. That’s kind of the dumping place for all files. Moving to more teams-based file storage for most of this content.
Adam:
We have a question?
Adam:
You can add more storage. The question is, “Are there storage limits?” It’s based on your organization size. We can get the details and post that later. The default, I believe, starts out at 500 gigabytes and then adds a certain amount per user at that point. They’re continually expanding those storage limits. If you need to add more terabytes of storage, it’s pretty reasonable.
Ryan:
The question was, “Will you see the edits that are made?”
Adam:
Yes, you would see the edits in real time. You can see where other people are working on that document. What’s cool about the auto save capability, is that you actually have the ability to see different revisions as well. You don’t have to just be stuck with somebody deleting a paragraph that you loved, you can go back in time and see those edits historically.
Ryan:
Awesome.
Adam:
Another thing that I want to show with this is the plus button over here. If I click that, right off the bat I can add different functions, different services that are within Office 365 on the top. I can add a planner. I can add a OneNote. I could add a form. I can also just click “website” and add any website. It’s just a quick integration within that channel.
Ryan:
This is really awesome because nowadays when there’s so many… Being on the marketing and sales team, there are so many Cloud based apps that I use that not even our own IT team knows about, that I would love to plug into here. This allows integrations with so many things.
Adam:
This gets to a larger topic of enterprise Cloud software adoption, and the challenge when we start adding 20 different services that people have to log into. What I like to look at is, if you are on a single sign on journey, and we’ll have a webinar on that.
Adam:
Teams can represent one of the last additional things that you have to add. We’re always adding more things, more places for people to go to. Which is really a key point on adoption that we’ll talk about. You want to make sure that you roll functionality into this, so it’s not just another place people have to go to. Since you can integrate so many of the external services, you can do so in a way that’s really seamless in a way for people to access those without a lot of inconvenience.
Ryan:
There was one thing that I did want to note that was outside of the integration piece. It’s really just more around taking the second option that Adam had mentioned around diving into Teams and actually creating a team for your company. This is a best practice that we learned, and we’ve had a lot of success with. You’ll see on the screen here, Adam’s got the All Company team there. What this is, our organization is around 80 people. We’re not a massive team. We can really use one team for our entire company to share things that literally everyone in the company should have insight over, or have insight into.
Ryan:
You can see here All Company again. Everyone in our organization is on that single team. The channels within that are general. Bonusly, which is an app that we use internally for peer to peer recognition. It’s actually really awesome. Sam should give me some Bonusly soon. Client headline, so any time something awesome is happening, a client will post that there. Sometimes when things that aren’t happening great, we’ll also share that. We want everyone to be in the loop here.
Ryan:
Internal updates, which is really great. What are teams are working on? What do you need from other teams? The last channel here is social, and that’s life at Worksighted. That’s us having fun. That’s us sharing about things we’re doing, things we’re involved with. I think that this has bene a huge success for us, and I don’t know if you would agree with that or if you’ve seen other companies do the same thing.
Adam:
That’s a great way to get people into it. For us, because we already had Chat so widely adopted, then it became kind of a no-brainer to add a team and start doing this essential notification and messaging that we need to be able to send out to everyone. Social, for example, there might be things about news. There might be things about our wellness. There might be things about, I brought doughnuts in. Things along those lines. It helps to filter content. That’s a key thing with Teams, is trying to make sure that you can see only what you want to see, only at the right times. You asked the question about why would you create different channels or what are different channels are there for. It’s really when it makes sense to segment out content, so that I know when I’m going to that area for.
Ryan:
Here’s a question for you then. If we have the All Company team and there’s a conversation happening in there, and let’s say maybe it’s not relevant to everyone in the company. Maybe it’s very specific to one team in the company. What do you do? Do you advise that team to go create their own team? Take the conversation away from the group as a whole? If so, how do we go about doing that?
Adam:
You have to remember you also have group chat as well. Part of any successful team’s adoption is sharing best practices. It’s training. It’s making sure that we’re leading by example. That there’s new and continuous content going in there. We want to make sure that people have a reason to keep going into it. I’ve seen lots of cases where people are just kind of, and you know we did this initially when we first started playing with teams, let’s create a team. See what we can use it for.
Adam:
Sometimes you had a failed adoption, because what exactly are we doing with this? This looks like just another place we have to go to. When we understood that this can replace different functionality, and there are cases the reasons why this is actually superior for different types of communication, then that’s when it really became a useful thing.
Adam:
I want to talk about the group chat thing, quick.
Ryan:
For creating a team.
Adam:
You have your channels and you can have your content within here. You can also group chat. The quickest way to think about that, in my mind, is you group chat with other coworkers when it’s some topic and conversation that doesn’t benefit everyone else to be a part of.
Ryan:
I would also say what is the life span of that conversation? If it’s an ongoing conversation that’s going to be happening forever, you could consider using a team. If it’s something, a client is down and we really need to gather five different employees from areas of the company, and have the one conversation around hey we need to get that back up and running, a group chat is awesome for that.
Adam:
Exactly. If it’s anything you’re talking about that really somebody in the future would want to refer back to, and it’s useful for everyone to be aware of that situation and what’s going on, then it’s useful to put it within the channel of the team.
Ryan:
Is anyone allowed to create teams?
Adam:
It depends on the settings administratively. An organization can be very open and allow really anyone to create a team. Or you can create lots of different roles and limit what users are capable of doing. I’m going to show you what that kind of process looks like, because I’m going to create a team. I can click “join or create a team”. You can have private teams, as well as public teams. Here’s an existing one that I can join, or I could have a code that somebody gives me to join a team. I can search available teams, or I can create a team. If I’m going to create one here, I’m going to build one from scratch. I can have the choice again of is it a private team, or is it a public team. I’m going to create a private team. The best thing here would be to add some sort of description that tells people what this is about.
Adam:
Now I’ve created a team. I can start typing and adding members to this team. I’m going to add those, and I can also have the ability to pick whether or not they’re going to be an owner, or just a member.
Adam:
Right off the bat, you can see you end up with a general tab, or channel as a start. Then you have your conversations, your files, and our wiki.
Ryan:
Will your teammates who were added to this, when you created it, be notified? Or will they know?
Adam:
They will receive a notification, and then it will show up on their teams list here on the left. Which you may not want to be member of that team. So if somebody adds you, and you don’t want to be a member of that team, or you were added by accident, you can leave the team. You can also hide teams, so that they go under hidden teams. You can clean up your interface and only see what you really want to see.
Ryan:
That’s a great feature. I probably have different teams that I’m a member of, but maybe only five to ten of them that I actually have open and active. The rest are hidden and out of sight, out of mind.
Adam:
Activity. You mentioned will people see things, and this is a quick spot I can do to just to see a feed of content that’s been added to different teams that I’m a member of, chat, calls, things along those lines.
Ryan:
When somebody mentions you, or comments on something you posted, you’re going to go on there and you’re going to see that, that they did that?
Adam:
Exactly.
Ryan:
It sounds like there’s no excuses to miss notifications anymore. That’s interesting.
Adam:
We’re all busy.
Ryan:
Yeah, interesting.
Adam:
One other quick area I want to show is the calls. You may wonder why is there a separate call section over here?
Ryan:
Yeah, because you showed us we could do it within the other interfaces.
Adam:
Exactly. Given where my account is set up right now, this is really just a consolidated view of that. I want to talk about what’s kind of cool about that. One of the things that’s really awesome is that I can chat or call with anyone that’s now a member of the organization. So when we add a new member, such as Emily, I can initiate a call with her without having to know what her desk phone number is, her cell phone number is. It’s really easy to quickly get ahold of people that way.
Adam:
The reason why there’s a separate call section, is you can add on full enterprise PBX functionality via add on licensing, or if you have the correct licensing. It’s possible to expand teams into an organization wide phone system. But that’s what too in depth for us to get into right now.
Adam:
Lastly, files. These are the main ones that people see right off the bat. This is where you can see all the recent files that you worked on through Cloud storage, within Teams. You can filter where those locations are. Then again same thing, you can right click. You can edit in the browser. You can edit it within Teams. You can work on those quickly.
Ryan:
That’s awesome. I think that covers most of the basic features. Do we have any random questions that have popped up?
Adam:
When I mentioned making phone calls, the reality is that we’ll call her at her desk if she’s signed into Teams there. It also would call her at her mobile phone if she has the Teams app installed on that. That will show up on her phone as if it’s any other call.
Ryan:
That’s what I really like. Even though you are getting a call from Microsoft Teams, it comes through like a normal phone call would come through on your phone. Like a normal iMessage would come through, and it really makes using it extremely easy. I’m getting a call right now. I’m not sure if anyone can see this from my awesome teammate, Becca. I don’t know why she would be calling me during a webinar, though. So I’m going to decline that. That shows the feature. It really is helpful. It’s very integrated into what you’re using already, and how you’re using it.
Adam:
That would work anywhere in the world that you have a data connection. You just need to be connected to the internet. You don’t need to be on the network here in the office or anything like that.
Adam:
There’s a lot more functionality that we’ll get in to the future and have future events. One of the big things is how to be successful of your adoption of Teams.
Ryan:
Let’s talk about that. I think if you have Microsoft Teams right now, and everyone has access to it but you’re not using it, this will be the biggest linchpin to whether or not you’re successful with it or not. Is really how you go about actual, rolling it out and getting adoption within your organization.
Adam:
There’s a lot of lessons we’ve learned internally, as well as working with other clients. There’s really a lot of content. We’ll probably do some Q&A with people who have adopted it, and get some more content for you guys in that regard. Some of the key things that I want to mention is, you really want to make sure you have leadership approval. This is feedback from a client that had a pretty successful teams rollout.
Ryan:
Are you saying IT leadership?
Adam:
Organizational leadership.
Ryan:
So actual, leadership, leadership. Executive leadership.
Adam:
Exactly. Nobody wants necessarily something pushed out that doesn’t ultimately doesn’t have the capital behind it. The push behind it that it needs in order to be successful. You really have to make sure that your different use case is intentionally figured out. Making sure that you’re messaging exactly what this is about. Why people need to be using it. Why they should go into it, and what it’s used for. Etiquette, things along those lines.
Ryan:
Something we definitely experienced internally with our rollout was not trying to dictate how other teams used Microsoft Teams. As we showed, we have our All Company team, which is everyone in the organization. Individual teams have their own uses for Microsoft Teams. I personally feel like it’s really important to let those teams know that it’s on them to figure out how to best use this tool and these resources. Rather than saying, “Here’s a one blanket standard and how we use it across the company.” Unless of course that’s how your organization runs.
Adam:
That’s a good way to start, potentially. Get people used to it. See how it works and then figure out how they can take advantage of it.
Adam:
I really see a lot of momentum when you’re actually using it for file storage, as well. That’s where people are going to get to files that they need to access, then that’s a really powerful use case there.
Adam:
The question is, if you store a file inside of teams, it’s actually stored inside of SharePoint? The answer is yes. I’m going to show you quickly what that looks like. If I go into a channel, so I’m going to product development, general, go to files. I can click open in SharePoint. So it’s going to open up my web browser, and it’s going to open that inside of SharePoint. Which I don’t have access to that particular file.
Ryan:
But if you did have access, it would open within SharePoint.
Adam:
Correct.
Adam:
Let me try that again, here. So this, unfortunately, is a limited account.
Ryan:
Demo account.
Ryan:
Can’t show you the actual Worksighted account.
Adam:
Yeah, exactly.
Ryan:
Security reasons.
Adam:
Actually the reason why it’s doing this is because I’m signed in as “me” on the web browser.
Ryan:
Got it. Well I think that answer the question overall, is that yes, it is shared under SharePoint.
Adam:
That’s correct.
Adam:
You can actually use the OneDrive sync client as well, because it’s stored in SharePoint. You can sync that down to your local PC, like you would for your OneDrive.
Adoption
Ryan:
One other thing that I want to mention around the adoption, around the rollout, is finding champions. Finding people internally that support Microsoft Teams. Support what it can enable them to do, and will really get their teammates on board with it. That’s something that when rolling out Microsoft Teams we did was. Get a group of stakeholders together from throughout the organization who can basically speak on behalf of their team, and how they want to use it.
Ryan:
We have a group of six or seven people on our internal champions team. Maybe only four of those people are actually using Microsoft Teams engaged every single day. The other two teams have yet to find their workflow yet. And that’s okay, because they’re still expected to use it in some cases. But we’re working with them to figure out how does it actually work within their team, within their employees, their workflows, things like that. Really the champions piece, outside of having leadership support, you really need to have also a trickle down effect of other people supporting it as well.
Adam:
Along those lines as well, one thing that you did was creating some specific training content as well.
Ryan:
The training content is extremely important. After the webinar, in the future, reach out to us. Ask us if you want to see what we did. What kind of content we created. Even though Microsoft Teams has every single how to article out there in the world, I would definitely recommend using a training platform. Developing training that’s relevant to your employees. You don’t have to recreate the wheel and use Microsoft. You can use all of Microsoft’s content that they already have created. Basically just cater it to what your employees will actually need.
Ryan:
You don’t want to overlap uses with Microsoft Teams. You don’t want to train people on using one tool that they’re already using another tool for. You really have to help make sure that the training is catered to them.
Ryan:
Outside of that, I think that on-going training is also something that we are focusing on Worksighted. We did a Microsoft Teams 101. In the future we’re going to do a 102. As Microsoft Teams rolls out new features and capabilities, we’re usually communicating out how people can use those and what they should do with those features.
Ryan:
I think that sums up the overview and the functionality of Microsoft Teams. We do have another question right now.
Q&A Session
Ryan:
That’s a great point. Somebody mentioned that if you aren’t following a channel within a team, you’re not going to get notifications. People won’t get notifications if they’re not following that channel. One way to ensure that they see a message if you post it, is you want to make sure you @ mention them so that pops up within their activity feed.
Adam:
I want to show a little bit about that. If I go to this research and development, let’s say I’m not that interested in this one. I can go into channel notifications and I can say whether or not it wants to notify me every time there’s a new post, banner, and feed, or only show the feed. Then I can pick whether or not if somebody @ mentions me, whether it shows on my feed. T
Adam:
The default here is that you don’t get a notification every time there’s new post. You want to make sure this is set to off, because otherwise you’re activity gets completely messy, noisy, and not useful. The banner and feed is a default. The key thing there is that allows you to make sure that even if you’re not keeping tabs, like let’s say I’m not looking all the time at research and development. If somebody does need my attention, they can just @ mention me.
Ryan:
I want to hit on that one more time. If somebody is not seeing notifications, if they are not seeing when they are @ mentioned, they have every capability within this tool to go and change their settings so that they do see those. Push back on them. Make sure that they know that they have that capability.
Adam:
Which is part of training, as well. If you have any other questions, we’re kind of officially in the Q&A section, so go ahead and post them now and Becca will relay them to us. It sounds like we have a few more already.
Adam:
That’s a good question. The question is about Office 365 licensing. It gets a little tricky, because it’s Microsoft and licensing, so why not. The short answer is, any Microsoft Office 365 license level, that has the Cloud platform, has access to Teams, typically. If you have the Exchange Kiosk account, I believe that does not. I would look at adopting something like F1, Frontline Worker 1. That’s a full Office 365 experience for the most part. There’s a few restrictions around how large their mailboxes are, similar to Exchange Online. The only licenses that really don’t have access to it at all would be the licenses that only give you the desktop applications.
Ryan:
Okay. Makes sense. Becca do we have any other questions live right now?
Ryan:
I have my own question for Adam, because I want to hear what his opinion is on it. Teams is compared to a lot of other tools that are similar right now. You’ve probably heard of Slack. You’ve probably heard of Cisco Teams, which I don’t understand why they called it Cisco Teams, way after Microsoft Teams was already a thing. Probably just to confuse people. There’s a lot of other tools that are similar to this. What are the biggest differences between them? Is there any one reason that somebody should say, “We’re going all in on Microsoft Teams” vs Slack, let’s say.
Adam:
One of the biggest ones, potentially, is cost. The reality is that Slack is a good product. Microsoft Teams is a newer product, but they’ve invested heavily in it, and it’s seen massive adoption across the industry. They’re committed heavily to it. There are sometimes little feature differences. Slack is better if you’re not in the Microsoft ecosystem, potentially. If you don’t have Office 365, you can get a Teams account. You don’t have to have full Office 365, but the thing I would say there is generally it’s best suited for organizations that helps consolidate the rest of the things that you’re doing in Office 365.
Adam:
If you’re a Google apps company, you may be looking at things within Google apps, or you may be looking at something like Slack. There may be some other use cases that Slack is potentially better for, but I’m unfortunately not a Slack expert, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you what those are. What I do know is that Microsoft Teams seems to, like a lot of other cases, hit vast majority of use cases and it does it pretty well. They have a great development plan, roadmap ahead as well.
Ryan:
I will go out on a limb here and say that everyone at Microsoft, or everyone at Worksighted loves Microsoft Teams more than Slack. I’m speaking for everyone.
Adam:
For everyone.
Ryan:
I can’t wait to see everyone get really mad about that, too.
Adam:
You heard him.
Ryan:
Perfect, so we don’t have any other questions. Somebody wanted to share a comparison between Slack and Teams.
Adam:
There is a lot of great content online about Teams. There’s a lot content about Office 365 in general. We’re going to continue creating content specifically in trying to answer questions that everyone may have. Microsoft has a lot of videos out there. There’s Microsoft mechanics on YouTube. There’s a lot of great training material that Microsoft has as well. Some quick Google searches will find you a lot of content, and we’ll post things that we find to be useful, as well.
Ryan:
On that note, our Worksighted NXT riffs that we have on our YouTube channel, Killian has been doing an amazing job with putting out a lot of stuff that we covered today, and some more. We intend on developing more of that like Adam mentioned previously. Make sure if you have any thoughts around things with Teams, problems, ideas that you have, that you would love to see us cover in either future webinars or tech riffs, things like that. Send them our way. Most of the content that we’re working with is usually generated from feedback we receive. We’re really just trying to answer the questions that you guys have every day.
Adam:
Yep, absolutely.
Ryan:
Becca, I don’t think we have any other questions. If that’s that, then we’re probably going to have to wrap it up now. Everyone, thanks for joining. Again, you can email Becca@Worksighted.com with any questions. This presentation was recorded, so if you want to refer back to anything we said, we’ll send this out after so everyone can see it. With that, honestly, I think we can wrap up our first NXT webinar. You’ll be seeing an invite for our October one. We’ll be sending an invite for our October one soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that as we finalize the topic and content around that.
Adam:
Thank you, everyone.
Ryan:
Thanks.
Worksighted Team
