Webinar filmed live 4/2/2020

 

While we all quickly adapt to our new reality in a world of COVID-19, many businesses are struggling with the transition from a traditional office arrangement to remote only. The good news? You are not alone, and you have options to help make this transition smooth for your team.

One of the most common questions we’ve received recently is, “I think I have Microsoft Teams, but now what?” During this live webinar, we will cover everything from licensing and admin settings, to creating your first team and granting users access.

Whether you are new to Teams, use it for basic features like chat or video, or are planning on implementing this into your day-to-day workflow, the topics covered in this webinar will provide valuable insight and direction for everyone while working through these transitions.

Let’s Jump in!

Adam Devereaux:

All right. Welcome everyone to another Worksighted NXT webinar. For those of you that have tuned to previous webinars that we’ve run, you may know that this is a little different. Obviously, with everything that’s going on, we’re doing this a little bit more bare bones and we’re going to be focusing on content in the screen for the most part. So I don’t have Jordan, or Mike, or anyone else here with me today. So you have to bear with me. Hopefully I do all right. You’ll have to get used to just hearing my voice a lot.

Adam Devereaux:

So, we obviously have a lot of interest in Teams and remote work right now. We wanted to put together another Teams focused webinar, specifically for a category of organizations that are looking at adopting Teams, and how to potentially get started in a really fast way. So we’ve had a lot of interest in this particular webinar. So, I’m going to take a little time to go into Teams a little deeper later on in terms of the interface, what you would use it for, the use cases, and more on what this particular webinar is going to be focused on.

Adam Devereaux:

So we are going to do … there’s a Q&A section, so feel free to submit your questions at any point. We’re going to be going through a couple different sections, and then if there are questions relevant to those sections, we will stop and answer those questions and then we’ll do a general Q&A at the end. So feel free to ask any questions regarding Teams ideally, of course, and we’ll get to those at the end.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes, so really the idea here is that there’s a spectrum of organizations out there, if we look at the far end, you’ve got the Teams pros, companies that have been using it for a couple of years now, and they’re fully adopted, and they’re ahead of the pack. And then over here, you have companies or people that, Teams, what is that? So this is focused more towards the earlier part of that spectrum, where you already have Office 365 or you’re looking at adopting it, and you want to adopt Teams, but you don’t necessarily know where to start. And you want to start lean and experiment with the different use cases from there.

Adam Devereaux:

There are different ways to start a Teams journey, and especially for larger organizations, I would urge that you go through a more deliberate Approach, where you consider the business use cases, so that you can message and train people to the way that your organization is going to adopt it. But that takes a lot more work upfront, it takes more planning upfront, more messaging up front. And this way of adopting it is a little bit more targeted to if you have access to Teams now or you want to get that going, you want to give it to some people, get the tool in the hands of your users, and then more organically figure out how you’re going to use it.

Adam Devereaux:

So, of course, some consideration ahead of time is still important and focusing on the different use cases will be something that we’re going to talk about. So the goal here is that you’re going to learn what you need to be able to launch Microsoft Teams. You’re going to know a little bit about the Admin interface and the Admin setup, and what we recommend is some essential policies around the Admin setup. And then we’re going to do a basic rollout guide for a team, and then what next steps you may have.

Adam Devereaux:

So, the primary use cases, or answering the question of, what is Microsoft Teams? Starting, I’m going to take it back a little bit from the Approach or the consideration that Microsoft Teams is a place where people can collaborate on information, on files, it is a consolidation of collaboration tools. We have had a lot of different split collaboration tools in the past where you might have instant messaging in one platform and App, you might have online meetings in a different platform and App, you might have file sharing through an entirely different method. And a lot of this comes back to email and the challenges around email.

Adam Devereaux:

We’ve had email for a very long time now, but the structure that it’s built on has not really changed that much in decades now at this point. And communication has shifted. I mean, if you think about it now, you have a lot of different tools that you use to communicate with people. You might have text messaging, instant messaging, you have group texting, might have collaboration around file sharing, like chat within file sharing. And none of those things really are relevant in email. You can do file sharing in email but there’s a lot of downsides to that around security, control of the information, splitting the files.

Adam Devereaux:

So, because there’s all these other ways of communicating, there’s this opportunity to create a more cohesive, consolidated Application that allows you to do all of that in a more powerful way by bringing all those tools together in one place. So that’s really the idea behind Teams. And then it allows you to tie in other services and Applications that you use, so you have potentially even more capability to expand and spend more of your time in one tool, because I’ve heard and felt Same way, when we look at all these different tools that people and organizations have adopted in the past, sometimes it’s like another place to go for more information, that’s really frustrating.

Adam Devereaux:

So the idea here, and when Teams can be really powerful, is if it’s someplace that consolidates where you go. So rather than another place that you have to go, it actually becomes your primary place for a lot of your communication. And that’s something we felt and found even organically internally. So we’ve been on a Teams journey over the last couple of years. We started really with instant message, and calls, and video calls, and started adopting Teams themselves.

Adam Devereaux:

We’re still learning, still going through that process, but I can say, especially with everything that’s going on right now, it’s been a extremely valuable tool for our team to be adaptive, mobile, allowing us to work remote in ways that we weren’t able to before. And it’s really been a primary place that we go to for internal communication. So it’s not that we don’t ever send any internal emails, but I would say, it’s down significantly. I haven’t seen the latest numbers, but our internal email volume dropped very significantly with Teams. And it’s easier to find the things that you need, I think 80% of the internal emails that I was using before now all of that communication is within Teams.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. So again, in part because of the interest, and I wanted to expand the scope of what we’re talking about with this particular webinar, I wanted to talk a little bit more about Teams and the way that the interface works for those of you that aren’t necessarily familiar with it. So I’m going to go into a demo tenant that we have set up here. And there’s not a lot of content in here because of the fact that we’re starting from scratch so you can see what that process looks like. But what I’m doing here is I’m actually launching the web interface of Microsoft Teams. And if you look at the App, the overview of what it is you have a web App version, you have a local App that runs on Windows or Macintosh, and then you also have a mobile App that runs on Android and iOS devices. So, just refresh that here.

Adam Devereaux:

So when you are in Teams, and I’m in the web version, so it’s slightly different in terms of what it looks like, you have a variety of different interface elements. And I’m just going to go through those and explain how this works. So again, chat and instant message, so if you’ve used Skype for Business previously, for example, this is where that functionality has now consolidated into. This allows you to chat and instant message with your co-workers on whatever device that they’re on.

Adam Devereaux:

So, if we look at the chat interface up on the top here, we have the new chat option here. So what this does, it allows you to pick who you’re going to chat with by just typing in their name. And we’re using pseudonyms in this case here. And so my colleague Rebecca is helping me as well today. Who did I have you use Patty? So Patty Fernandez.

Adam Devereaux:

So if you look at this interface now that I’ve started the chat with Patty, you can see her name and picture up here, we have options down here where you have the type a message section, we have files that we can share through this chat here, and then I can also start an audio call or a video call with her from this interface as well. And if I was using the desktop interface, I would be able to also share my desktop as well. So that’s one difference between the desktop App and the Web App.

Adam Devereaux:

And then down here, I can also click the formatting tab and I can put in a lot more control over the way that my chat looks, I can bold it, I can change the formatting, I can have bullet list all these other things, hyperlinks. So this chat interface is really a powerful way that I can communicate quickly with co-workers. And what we found is if you use Skype for Business previously, there were some issues with, if I have it on my phone, and my computer, and let’s say on a terminal server, the messages wouldn’t always show up in all the same places. And now it’s very reliable, it works very solid. Regardless of what device I’m on I see all of my chat history with that person and I have access to those resources.

Adam Devereaux:

Another option that they’ve added recently too is that can set chat priority. So, I can send a standard message just as usual, I can mark it as important. So this doesn’t really do anything other than flag the person, just like sending an important email to let them know this is an important message. And now there’s an option, and this came out of Teams for healthcare, that’s been ported into the general setup as urgent. And what this does is it actually sends priority notification to their devices over a period of time and it says right here, so the recipient will be notified every two minutes for 20 minutes. So it’s almost like a paging, it’s going to keep bugging people.

Adam Devereaux:

You also have the ability to do group chat. So I can add more people into this if I wanted to. And if you know Patty here added a nice GIF into the chat as well. Now, because I’ve added another person, what this actually does is it creates a new chat interface. So I still have my one on one chat with Patty here, and then I have now a new chat, that’s a group chat. And I can do things too, I can rename this. So I could say, this is the awesome squad, and then now this is a named group chat. And if I add additional people onto this, it actually gives me the ability to include the chat history.

Adam Devereaux:

So, chat, then we have meetings on top of that. So in here, we have the ability to do online meetings, just like many other platforms you may have used. I use this every single day, most of my day now is in Teams meetings, whether it’s with clients or with internal coworkers, it’s a constant thing that I’m in a Teams meeting. And this is something that we found shifting to video has been really powerful. Using video chat, it’s in between a phone call and in person, but that difference is significant we found versus just phone calls. It helps people to feel more connected and be more more personable and direct.

Adam Devereaux:

So, if you have Teams installed on your computer, you also have the ability to send Teams meetings from within an Outlook invite. And you will see your Outlook calendar in here. It’s not fully featured Outlook calendar interface, but it would have all of your events. So I can click on new meeting, add a title, this is very familiar probably to any other meeting interface that you’ve used. I can add people that I want in here. I can pick the time when it’s going to hAppen. I can add a channel If I had a channel that I wanted to embed the meeting in. And I can add a location if I have a room or something that I want it to be in.

Adam Devereaux:

And so now if I send this meeting, they’re going to receive an email invite just like if you’re sending it out of Outlook. You can click test meeting. And you can see the interface or the way that it would look in the email. So what what Patty will see in her email is this Join Microsoft Teams Meeting link. And then in this case, because this account has the add on for audio conferencing, there’s also a phone number that’s attached. So again, very similar to any other meeting interface that you’ve seen.

Adam Devereaux:

What I’ll note is that using the link will either allow you to join the meeting using a web interface, just like a lot of other services, or you can join that meeting from within the Application itself, whether that’s on your phone or on your desktop. And so the advantage there as well, so key question that people may have or I often hear is, does somebody have to already have Teams or have a Teams account to use to join the meeting? The answer is no. You can send this out to external people, you can send it out to someone who doesn’t have Teams to send it out to their email, or they can just call the number. But if you want them to join the full rich meeting experience, then they would join within the App. They don’t have to have a Teams account already set up to do so. Just like if you look at GoToMeeting, WebEx, Zoom, any of those platforms, it’s the same type of setup here.

Adam Devereaux:

What’s really powerful as well is that I can just join the meeting right from within the Application, I can just click Join here. And that really helps, going to do it without video and audio so it doesn’t cause any issues here. This really helps make it really convenient and easy for you to jump into these meetings. If you have Teams meetings in your calendar, you can just go into those and join, I don’t have to go into my other calendar, find the invite, open, click the join link, launch the web page, launch the App, it’s just very quick and straightforward, you just click Join Now.

Adam Devereaux:

So if I join a meeting, then I have a couple different options, I can do audio off, which is often the way that I do it on my desktop because I’ll actually call from my phone as well. You can join on multiple devices. So if I join in my phone, then I can do the audio through my headset on my phone, and then but I can see it all on the screen here as well. And then you have chat within that, you have screen sharing, you can see the participants. I can go pretty in depth on this. And we’ve created other content if you’re more curious about Teams itself and the way it works that can be helpful for this. So, I don’t want to go too in depth about meetings and every individual part. But then the other big thing here is teams themselves. And we’re going to go into that a little bit more in depth here in just a moment.

Adam Devereaux:

I wanted to highlight some of the resources that we’re going to be going into and using here. And one of them is a team success kit that Microsoft has put out that really has a lot of good resources that you can use to get a leg up and ease this adoption. And then we also have a lot of different resources that we’ve linked on our website at worksighted.com/microsoft-teams. And we have a link to that success kit at that web page as well. So what the success kit is, When you download it, is it’s actually a zip file. And when you extract that zip file, you’re going to see these three folders and then a getting started with Teams overview PDF.

Adam Devereaux:

So this goes into the way that you can use it, it has different templates and things that it talks about, announcement email templates, it has links to welcome videos, quick start guides, and then they have access to lots of other admin documentation and training. So if you go into end user communication, for example, there are some example emails that you can use. There are example posters, there are announcement templates, lots of different things that you can quickly adapt and send out to your users letting them know, hey, we’re going to be adopting Microsoft Teams, we’re going to roll it out.

Adam Devereaux:

And I would recommend that you really consider who your end user champions are going to be as a part of a rapid rollout. So if you’re going to be making this happen quickly, I would find your Teams champions internally, give them access to create teams or give them access to Teams early, have them start playing around with it, so they can help train your users as well and make sure that you’re successful.

Adam Devereaux:

So that’s a really great resource that you can access. But I wanted to actually, through this webinar, run through what setting it up looks like and some of the licensing requirements and the admin setup and everything else. So licensing can be a little confusing, there are changes that have happened within the last couple of days with Microsoft. As always, they like to keep us on our toes, there is a lot of rapid development. There’s a lot of controversy around these name changes because some people had just gotten used to the previous ones or got to understand them. I do think it makes sense, but it’s definitely an adjustment.

Adam Devereaux:

So what we recommend are some licensing bundles. So Microsoft has two main tiers of their licensing bundles. There are the business tiers, and then there’s the enterprise tiers. The the big fundamental difference between them is that the business licenses are limited to a maximum of 300 licenses, whereas enterprise can go into the thousands and 10s of thousands. There are slight differences between each one of them, but for most organizations, if you qualify to use the business licensing, then I would recommend that you either use standard or premium.

Adam Devereaux:

And standard is the full cloud platform as well as Apps that you can install on your computer Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint. Premium is a bundle that includes a lot of really important security capabilities on top of that as well. And then the enterprise licensing E1, E3, or E5, those would all have access to Teams as well. So any of these license bundles, Teams comes with it. There is a add on license for audio conferencing, but that’s not necessary to do conference calls with people. You just don’t get that phone number. But you can still do conference calls as long as people use the Teams App really just like any other platform. You can join using the Teams App either through the web interface and just clicking the link or on their devices.

Adam Devereaux:

And you also need licensing for Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, getting into the nitty gritty. All of that’s included in those licensing models. So again, if you have Microsoft 365 Business, formerly known as Office 365 Business, essential, standard, or premium, or E1, E3, or E5, you have everything you need. If you have more granular, restricted licensing, the reason why SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange are needed is because when you create a team, there’s an underlying SharePoint team site that’s created, that is where files and information is stored. When you’re sharing files in your chat users, that information is stored in user’s one drives, and then Exchange because it’s tied in with calendars, and contacts, and the meetings, all of that needs to be tied to your user’s Exchange mailbox as well.

Adam Devereaux:

Again, that’s all in the back end, but just wanted to go into understanding that those things are necessary. So let’s jump into the Teams Admin interface here. So I’m going to go back here. A long way potentially. So this is the Office 365, now Microsoft 365 Admin Center. For those of you that are admins, you may be familiar with this. If not, this is something that whoever your administrator, if that’s work cited, for example, we can help you to get these set up. And you’ll note, if you click in here, there’s really a limited options on the left side here, but there’s a show all. And if we click that, then we get a list of additional admin centers and there’s dedicated Teams Admin Center.

Adam Devereaux:

So this is what that looks like. We have a couple of different benchmarks, a couple of different options over here on the right, but we’re going to focus on the left side. Right at the top, starting, we have the Teams and Manage Teams option. So you can see we have no Teams in this organization. And that’s where we would go to see all the different Teams that are in the organization. And then you have Teams policies. So when you click on that, you have this global org-wide default. So we’re going to go into that here. And you can see, create private channels, discover private Teams, those are on. Those are defaults for most organizations, that’s fine, we recommend leaving that in place.

Adam Devereaux:

As far as taking one step back to whether or not you allow users to create Teams, what I would recommend, especially for a lean launch, is that you leave it enabled, because by default, users can create Teams themselves. And then there’s actually an adoption team Lifecycle Management guide that Microsoft has as well that’s pretty useful. But this really allows you to enable your users to start adopting this tool and find out what works for them.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay, so there’s a lot of things in here that we don’t need to go into right now, but under org-wide settings, so there’s devices, locations, users, meetings, we’re going to go into a few of these, and we’re going to start with the org-wide settings. And the first one that’s important for organizations that have been using Teams for a while is the Teams upgrade tab, because this is a new organization, I’m not seeing anything in here. But for those of you that have been on Office 365 for a while, this is where you would decide whether or not you are transitioning from Skype for Business and in what way you want that to interact.

Adam Devereaux:

So there’s a couple different options. Typically, Island mode is what it sets you by default where Teams stuff hAppens in Teams and Skype for Business stuff happens in Skype for Business. What I would recommend is if you’re making this rapid adoption, switch that to Teams only, there’s an option in there, Teams only, and that basically turns off Skype for Business for your tenant and allows you to start using Teams right away and it’ll work the way that it should.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. So org-wide settings here we have external access. So this is important when we start looking at allowing people to communicate with other outside organizations. This is where you could actually add outside domains that allow people to communicate, you can create a trust between the different tenants, and then Guest Access is really important as well. This is where you decide whether or not you want to allow external people to be added to your Teams. And for some organizations, this is something that you would want because you can use those Teams to collaborate with external people and share files and everything else. And this is where you can restrict what guests are allowed to do.

Adam Devereaux:

So team settings as well, it may be worth looking in on this, but for the most part, I would recommend that the defaults be left in place. The way that I would also describe this too is that, it’s important to understand the security that is behind Microsoft Teams, it is part of Microsoft’s cloud platform, so the full enterprise security capabilities are in place there, all activities in Teams are logged and auditable. So it is a part of your organization, a part of your tenant, all the security controls that you may have in place now or are going to put in place, apply to this as well.

Adam Devereaux:

So it’s really a secure place for you to allow your users to share and do instant messaging all these things, that’s giving you still a lot more protection than if they’re going out on their own and using other platforms that you have no control over. Which is often what happens if you don’t give people the tools that they need and want to be able to collaborate. So e-discovery, content search, in place holds, really the goal here is to help users with new tools and capabilities but still have full control over the manageability of information both sharing internally and externally.

Adam Devereaux:

So, it also integrates with your identity management platform, with Azure Active Directory, so that can get a little bit more in depth for sure. And we will have some more teams that are targeted at specific things or webinars going forward. So let’s return back to the interface here.

Adam Devereaux:

All right, so going back in here to users, we can see all the users that are in our tenant. In this case, this is a test tenant. These are all the users that are in Office 365. So you can set individual policies here. Typically, that’s not something that we tend to set up, we don’t have to create any individual user settings, you want to keep it simple. So, if we go to meetings, meeting policies, in here we have the global again, and this is where you have a few different options that you can enable. And this is really important when it comes to the way that people are going to interact with your meetings that you send out to people.

Adam Devereaux:

So starting from the top we have the general meeting policies, along meet now and channels, allow the Outlook add in, allow channel meeting, scheduling, allow scheduling private meetings, I recommend leaving all of those on. Audio and video, allow transcription is off, in this case, I’d recommend turning that on as well. It’s not necessarily something that a lot of people are utilizing now, but it actually does a really good job and you may note that with this webinar, there’s actually a live transcription option, and there will be a transcription that gets created from the recording that we create and upload. So, it’s not perfect, but it is pretty amazing how far speech recognition has come.

Adam Devereaux:

Allow cloud recording. So this allows you to record or your users to record their meetings, this is also something that I would generally recommend to be turned on. And then these defaults you can leave in place. So screen sharing mode, this is where it’s a tier of permissions. So, by default, it’s entire screen. This means that they can share the entire screen and also single Applications. If you go to single Application, that means they can only share a single Application when they To share their screen. Again, I’d recommend generally leave that on entire screen, and you can also disable the ability for people to share their screens.

Adam Devereaux:

So, you also have a toggle for allowing a participant to give a request control, allow PowerPoint sharing, allow whiteboard, etc. This is an important one, allow an external participant to give a request control, I would say generally leave that off, because this is somebody that’s outside of your organization. And then down here is also a very important one in regards to the way that people interact with those meetings, let anonymous people start a meeting. So what this means is if it’s off, when somebody calls into a meeting or they join a meeting from outside of your organization, they will be in a waiting room and you have to admit them once you’re ready. That’s generally the way you want it to at least start, and then if you find that, that’s bothersome, then you can change that.

Adam Devereaux:

But that allows anyone in your tenant, any user … So if I, for example, had a meeting, scheduled it, and I invited Rebecca, who was inside of Worksighted tenant obviously, and then you, whoever you are, if you joined from externally, you would be in the waiting room, but either one of us could admit you. So it doesn’t have to be me the meeting organizer, but it could be anyone else that’s within Worksighted as well.

Adam Devereaux:

Allow chat meetings enabled, I would recommend leave it that way. Live captions disabled, but the organizer can override, I recommend that you leave that there. Allow meet now and private meetings, again, leave that on I would recommend. So this is pretty straightforward, but this is where some confusion comes around. Allow dial in users to bypass the lobby. In this case because we’re not allowing anonymous people to start a meeting that wink I can’t enable that separately, so I’m going to leave that alone.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. So what I’m going to do is actually go into the Teams interface now, and I’m going to create a team. So this is the Teams area. And if you launch Teams for the first time in your tenant, you don’t have any Teams, it will actually pop up and it will want you to create a team from the start. And so we need to think about what team do we want to create from the get go. And what I would recommend as a starting point is a general company team. An org wide team is an actual type of team that you can create that automatically adds everyone, but I’d recommend that you either base this off a group that you already add everyone in the company to, or you manually create this for now and add every user in the company.

Adam Devereaux:

And so a couple different options you have right off the bat is you can create from an existing Office 365 group. Teams is like an Office 365 group on steroids. So if you have an existing Office 365 group that you want to turn into a team, again, if it’s one that’s an all company group, I’d recommend using that. But in this case we’re going to build a team from scratch. And then we have an option to pick what type of team that it’s going to be. So it’s private, public, org-wide, in this case we’re going to do a public one. And then we give it a name, and I’m just going to say, Contorso, which is the org name for those of you that know Microsoft’s nomenclature here. And then I can add members to it. So I’m going to add Patty to this team. And then I’m going to put her as an owner as well so she can control who’s a member of this team.

Adam Devereaux:

Okay, so now I have a team over here. And you might ask, what is a team about? Why would I create a team versus a channel or versus chat? The way that I look at it is a team is a group of people who are working together on a common cause. So, your teams, as just a starting point, can match to your actual teams inside your organization, and that can mean different to different companies, whether that’s around some common thing that they’re doing, or if it’s something that is actually department based. It can depend on the specifics of your organization. But here, because it’s an org-wide team, I would recommend starting with a couple of different team channels. Channels are basically how you divide up that team of people into different types of communication, right.

Adam Devereaux:

So I’m going to add another channel in here and I’m going to call this, Teams Tips and Tricks, and I’m going to set this to be a standard, so everyone can see it, and I’m going to set it to automatically show it in everyone’s channel list here. And this is where I could post as the administrator, training resources, information, I can run meetings about, maybe if we want to do a Teams tips and tricks Friday or something, this is where I would put everything that’s related to having success with this Teams adoption. And then I’m going to create one that is called, Important Communication, and that’s an important one. That’s one where users can go to see official communication that’s important for everyone to be able to see.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Adam we have a question that just came in.

Adam Devereaux:

Yes.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I’m wondering if we can share certain channels or portions of channels with external clients? Is this through Teams or SharePoint? And how would we control or view who is shared to each channel?

Adam Devereaux:

So that’s a good question. And it gets into the external sharing options that are available with Teams. The way that I would look at it is, it’s important to understand that teams have members, and everyone who’s a member of that team, by default, has access to everything that’s in that team. So I can add external guests members, if that allow external guests is turned on in the Admin Center, by just typing in a full email address. So I can actually add myself. So there’s my email in case anyone is wondering. If I had external sharing enabled, I could basically add that person and they would show up in here as a guest user. That gives them access to this team. And the way that works is they can actually switch their Teams interface between tenants, and they can go into the works at a tenant, and they would see this whole team including all of the channels.

Adam Devereaux:

So you can’t share part of a channel, but any public channel that’s in a team will inherently be shared with members of that team. However, I can also add a private channel. So it’s a little bit reverse from how you would think, but in this case, I could add a private channel. So let’s say I create a team that’s dedicated to a project and I want to add some external participants to it. I would have my, let’s say, shared with everyone channel that I create, and then I would create a second one that’s internal private communication, and create it as a private channel.

Adam Devereaux:

So what this allows you to do is make this available to only a subset of the people that are in that team. So you can’t just add anyone in the world here, I could add Patty, because she is already a member of this team. But I can’t add Nestor because he is not a member of this team already. So even though he’s a valid user within the tenant, I can’t add him to a private channel within a team, because he’s not a member of that team.

Adam Devereaux:

So you’ll see a little block here that indicates that it’s a private channel. And I can manage the members of this separately. So I can add additional members to this channel. And I can see Patty here as a member of this private channel. And this allows me to have restricted information that not everyone within the team has access to. So it’s reverse of how you might think rather than creating a team that everyone has access to as a second step, you actually would create your public channels first, and then you’d create your private channels. And then if somebody is a member of that team, they would have access to this.

Adam Devereaux:

And just like any other case where you’re dealing with permissions, you just have to be mindful and careful around how that works. You can use SharePoint to share files specifically with people externally, you can use Teams for that as well. Again, it depends on your Admin settings here, but you can share those folders with external people. But by default, if somebody is a member of this team, even if they’re an external user, they can go into the Files Tab and see all of the files that are stored within that team as well. Good question. Hopefully that answers it.

Adam Devereaux:

So, again, what we are covering here is a basic rapid rollout of Teams. I would recommend most organizations, at least, put some time upfront into considering what’s the best way to adopt it? What do we want to use it for? What do we want to train users on? But you really can get started with it in a really quick fashion. You already have Teams now if you have Office 365, for the vast majority of people out there, you’re probably already on the licensing tier that gives you access to it. And you can see that now by going into your web interface.

Adam Devereaux:

So if I just go to Outlook.office365.com, for example, I’m going to pull up the web interface for Outlook. And then up here in the top left corner, you have what some people affectionately refer to as the waffle. This is the App launcher. And here I can see all of the other Apps in office 365 that I have access to by clicking all Apps, or I see a subset of them here, and you can see Teams. And so by clicking on that I get to the web interface for Teams.

Adam Devereaux:

It’s going to prompt you to launch or to download the desktop application, I definitely recommend that you download that if you don’t already have it. If you dismiss that, if you look over here on the left, there’s a download desktop App button. So you click on that. Downloads the desktop application, run it, now Teams will auto launch when you reboot your computer, it will stay signed in, and it works definitely a lot smoother.

Adam Devereaux:

So try that now. Again, you can create a team now, start from scratch, play around with it, add a few people use the interface and see how it works for you. There’s a lot more that can be done with it from this point on, and that’s something that we’d love to help you with. So it looks like we have another question.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Do Admins have access to logs of the chat within Teams or does Microsoft need to do the mining for those logs and then send them to you?

Adam Devereaux:

There are ways that you can access that. It’s beyond the scope of what I want to get into here. But from both e-discovery options, the chats are actually stored within the user’s mailboxes. So that’s something that you can access yourself without having to involve Microsoft.

Adam Devereaux:

So, again, going through that, what we’re talking about here is just a basic setup of Teams from the order of operations is I would double check your settings, admin settings, or have your administrator double check those, create an org-wide team to start, create your example channels, important communication is a good one. Another good one is social or fun, that’s where you can put things like, hey, I brought in doughnuts for my birthday and they’re in the break room. We’ve used our social channel, we have an all company. We’ve used it extensively over the last few weeks with the vast majority of Worksighted working remotely, to have fun engagements and contests and things that we want to help keep engaged. And I can be skeptical of those things like most and I would say it’s actually been a really good thing, it’s been pretty cool. So kudos to all of our team that do those activities by the way.

Adam Devereaux:

And then get the Teams App pushed out to your users. So, again, in the success kit, there’s some example communication that you can use, but let people know, hey, we’re going to be adopting Teams or we’re going to be using Teams, download the application on your computer, download the App on your phone. Once you get everyone to have the App on both their computer as well as on their mobile devices, that instantly unlocks the instant messaging capabilities from the standpoint of a high value, because you know that you can get ahold of really anyone on Teams. And really even the audio calls and the video calls, start to be a really good option right off the bat.

Adam Devereaux:

Then I would also recommend that you find Teams champions, whether this is organic because of people who are excited about it and just seem to be using it, or if you seek out specific people in departments and make sure that you have training resources and notifications, information on that being sent out as well. And that’s really a good starting point to at least get a basic adoption in place. Another question.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Can you switch from meetings in the desktop App and mobile Apps seamlessly, or do you have to hang up and rejoin on each device?

Adam Devereaux:

You can do it seamlessly. And by that I mean that you can … the state of being joined to the meeting is independent on each device. So if I leave the device on my phone, I’m still signed into the meeting on my computer, and that allows me to pick and choose which one I’m using for which thing. So you have to be careful too, because if you’re joining from both your desktop Application and your phone, for example, you can run into an issue where you create really bad audio feedback loop. One of the devices you’re going to want to join with audio off. And the way that you basically do that is when you go to the join interface here, you don’t normally get that but I did not allow it to see camera. You can see a toggle here, right, so I could manually turn off my camera and my microphone, or you have the option down here to join with audio off.

Adam Devereaux:

And it’s just as no speakers, no microphone, and this is really important, this is what I do on my desktop App the majority of the time, because if I join with audio off, then the speakers aren’t playing as well. Otherwise if I mute my microphone, I join, it’s still going to playback the audio through my speakers, and so if I’m using my phone, let’s say on speakerphone, and now all of a sudden it starts picking up the audio through that speaker, you’ll quickly get that cascading echo and it gets worse and worse. So I would have to manually turn off or mute my speakers. So that was the way it did it before they added this audio off option.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I’ll just add, from behind the scenes, this is your backup by the way, if you’re in a one on one meeting, I don’t think you can join separately, you have to end the call and restart it from the other device. But in a scheduled meeting, it’ll show up on your calendar, you can just press join.

Adam Devereaux:

Absolutely. Yes, that’s a good point. So the way that I’ll often use that is, and it’s cool because it gives me more mobility on the Teams App itself and this doesn’t make for great video but here I’m looking at it, I have a calendar interface, just like on the desktop App, I can hit join, and it’ll jump into the meeting. And if I’m using my headset, my air pods, my whatever I’m using for audio with my phone, I can have really good audio experience through this, and I’m mobile. So maybe I want to use the webcam on my computer, and I can actually do that because I can turn on my webcam, if I have one, to allow that to come through my computer, but I’m listening to the audio and it’s using my microphone through my phone, so I can get up and walk around during that meeting and still be listening in on it. So that’s pretty cool. Hopefully that answers that question. Any more questions at the moment?

Adam Devereaux:

Okay. Yes, I don’t have a whole lot else. What I just wanted to quick touch on too is that we obviously have our own internal adoption of Teams, but we’re working with a lot of different organizations to adopt Teams as well and the different use cases, what works well for different types of industry. So we really want to be your Teams partner and help you with that. So we’ve built some Teams training, quick start guides, we can do instructor led sessions, Blitz sessions. And the way that I look at it is the training side of it and the preparing side of it is of the same coin. So upfront, we can help you to understand and figure out what way that Teams will work for your organization, and then we can help you with the training your user side of it as well.

Adam Devereaux:

So that takes us to the general Q&A section. So we’re going to get into the rest of the questions that people have posted.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Great, make sure to keep on asking questions, Adam will for sure is willing to stay around at least till 12:30 so keep them coming. It looks like we’ve got a couple questions in terms of comparing Microsoft Teams to other Apps.

Adam Devereaux:

Right.

Rebecca Zaagman:

So the first one, at some point, could you touch on what makes Microsoft Teams better than say Cisco WebEx Teams products, especially if we do not have Office 365 or if you already use Citrix File Share? And someone else asked, what is better, Slack or Microsoft Teams?

Adam Devereaux:

Yes, so there are lots of good collaboration platforms out there. I’ll talk some of the advantages that I see with Teams is that it is integrated into the rest of the Office 365 platform. And having the instant messaging and the collaboration, the video calls, audio calls, and files all in one is pretty powerful. If you’re already successfully adopting a completely different platform, like Cisco Teams, and it’s working for you, I don’t know that you’d see a huge difference between Microsoft Teams, I think they each have their pros and cons in different ways. But if you’re using Office 365 on top of that, it does create a lot more powerful capabilities.

Adam Devereaux:

So some of the specifics that we can get into is because files stored in Teams are stored in SharePoint, you get the rich file sharing experience. And what I mean by that is I can share in lots of ways and it’s tied to the underlying file, and I can do collaborative editing. So you get the document checkout capabilities, the history and revision capabilities, the auto saving, the native integration into Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint is really gotten to be top notch. And you start bringing in the capability of tying into all sorts of other automation capabilities, Microsoft is really pitching a vision for AI and using their cloud platform and AI capabilities to enhance your capabilities in using those functions.

Adam Devereaux:

And one example of that is the Office Application. So because Teams again is part of the Office 365 platform, the files that I’m storing in Teams, I quickly have access to wherever I am using the office App. And if you don’t have this, by the way, you can find it in the App Store, it’s public, it’s available now, it’s just called Microsoft Office. If you had the separate Word and Excel applications on your phone, you can get rid of those, just have one App, works really well. And it has some cool capabilities around creating documents, I can scan text right into a Word document, it does Cloud AI based OCR, it works really quite well. I can even scan a table just using my camera, scan a piece of paper with a table on it, and it will process that and create that table inside of an Excel document.

Adam Devereaux:

So, it’s not that there’s any necessarily one killer feature, I would say that it’s more of the totality of the integration into the rest of the platform. So, it’s almost something that you have to experience once you get to the point of having files stored inside of SharePoint and Microsoft Teams that you’re using OneDrive, you’re using those applications. I can access that Word doc that I’m working on with somebody else and we’re doing collaborative editing on from any device that I have, really from anywhere in the world once I log in, and it just creates a really cohesive experience.

Adam Devereaux:

And then so on the topic of Slack versus Teams, Slack really has been a pioneer in this type of collaborative world. There are a lot of Slack fans out there and I don’t begrudge them that it’s a good Application. But whether it’s worth the price is the question that’s in front of us now. If you’re already using Office 365, and you have access to Teams, do you want to spend I think it’s … I don’t know the exact pricing, but it can be fairly pricey when you actually look at the paid. And there’s a free version, but there are some pretty significant limitations around that. And there’s free Teams as well.

Adam Devereaux:

So I would say too, if your org doesn’t have Office 365, you can get free Teams, you can sign up for Teams, there is a free version of Teams that you can utilize. You won’t get the full experience though because again, you’re not using the rest of the platform. I would say the meetings functionality is pretty top notch. There are other Apps like Zoom is another big one out there right now. Obviously, Zoom has had a huge growth, I won’t get into the security issues they’ve had recently. But Zoom does have some advantages with classroom type functionality, where you can have lots of people on screen at once so that the teacher can see all the students and do split off groups and things.

Adam Devereaux:

But as far as an organization is concerned, doing meetings, I would say that there are actual advantages to Teams over Zoom in regards to the way that it ties in one interface, you’re using it both for scheduled meetings, for live events, and just the little things can make a big difference. Me being able to just quickly join from within that Teams interface, it’s something that I found, even executives and other people find immediately intuitive and really quite powerful. So, hopefully that helps.

Adam Devereaux:

There’s comparison guides are out there if you search, Teams versus Slack, that will give you more specifics about the way that you’re using it. Both of them are definitely in the same category of tools. And I would say that Teams and Slack both continue to get better. But the integration into the rest of the platform is definitely a differentiator for Teams. Okay, more questions.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Yes. This one is asking about the free version of Teams, looks like they’ve signed up for it, but when we have people try and connect, it says we have already been signed up but no one has any login info or we’re not sure how to access our account. After calling support, they are not sure why we cannot access Teams. Any ideas on how we would go about resigning up so our employees can use it?

Adam Devereaux:

I would say … So for that specific one, I would probably remove those users and then re-add them. They should get an email letting them know that they’ve been added to a team. What I’d recommend though is that you look at the E1 trial. So there’s both the Teams exploratory license option, as well as Microsoft has just announced and made available a six month E1 trial, that is actually the full Office 365 platform. So it gives you the ability to explore and use Teams, as well as the rest of the Office 365 platform for six months.

Adam Devereaux:

So, I’ve used the free version of Teams a little bit, but most of my experience is with using it within the larger Office 365 tenants, people that are using Teams or Office 365. So I think we could probably help you with trying to get that solved, but, of course, I don’t necessarily have the exact answer to your question off the bat, sorry. Another question.

Rebecca Zaagman:

When sharing a file externally to a non-member, how much control does the administrator have in controlling how long the external member can see or use the file, and can you restrict the non-member from sharing that file?

Adam Devereaux:

The quick answer is yes to all of those things. The longer answers, there’s a couple different ways that you can do that from within setting limits around SharePoint. There’s things that you can do from within the web admin interface to restrict those. As well as you can do even more with PowerShell to restrict exactly what users are able to do with sharing. But along those lines, if we’re really looking at wanting to securely share files with people externally, I would also look at the capability of adding people as B2B users or guest users.

Adam Devereaux:

So there’s quite a lot out there, there’s a really cool article that they have, I don’t remember where it is offhand that Microsoft published in regards to creating access packages, so you can actually create it where people will become a guest user and your tenant. They sign in via their Microsoft account or their office 365 account, and you can create terms of use, you can set revision or review policies. So the guest account has to be reviewed every periodic point in time. So they have some really cool capabilities around what they call business to business guest users inside of your tenant.

Adam Devereaux:

Your users do have the capability to set some of those things themselves. So, I think I’ll just quick show here. So this is what we call the classic share interface in Office 365. Have you switched over to my screen? So this is a little bit small. But basically, this is the share interface that you’re going to get regardless of if you’re sharing right from within an Office 365 web platform or in this case, I use the OneDrive client on my computer. Which gets us into another area about some of the previous questions that have been in place.

Adam Devereaux:

But it gives me immediately some different capabilities on that. So I can share it with anyone with the link, so I can create a link that goes out to people, I can give specific people the access, and I can decide whether or not they have the ability to allow editing or not. And then I can also block download if I don’t allow them to edit, which is pretty cool.

Adam Devereaux:

So if I go back to the, anyone with the link, I can set an expiration date. So I can say this link is only going to be good until tomorrow, so you better access it quick. And I can also create a password that I give to specific people for them to access that. Once I’ve shared a file, I can actually review the share history on that file as well and see who’s accessed it or if people accessed it or not. And then of course, I can go back into that sharing setup on that file and disable what I’ve created.

Adam Devereaux:

So if I click on the three dots here, I can see that access here. So the ellipses, as people say, manage access. That’s something I can do after the fact once a document has been shared as well. So hopefully that helps give you an idea of some of the controls you have in place. You also, as the administrator, can control what your users are or are not able to enable in that share setting. So another question.

Rebecca Zaagman:

Can you have the same file saved in two separate places in Teams but update together as things are edited?

Adam Devereaux:

So the short answer is, no. Though I’d be curious more of what your intent is with that. So, let me just quick go into the interface and let’s say I’m in the general here, I go to files. So I’m in the general channel under the Contorso team, and then I clicked on the Files Tab, up in the top here, and then I can click New or I can click Upload. In this case I’m just going to quick create an Excel book. And you’ll note that by default, it basically launches the Excel Online interface right within Teams, I also have the ability to go into the ellipses and open it in my Excel browser, or Excel local install, or open in my browser. Both of these options allow me to still also have collaborative editing, still handle sharing and everything else from within there.

Adam Devereaux:

So let’s click the Open in browser, for example. So it launches the full Excel interface, and then I’ll exit out of this. So if I go back to that file interface here, right off the bat, I have the Copy Link option. So I can click here and I can add it as a tab, I can pin it to the top of the file list, I can copy the link. And so that’s what I would do is I would copy this link, so now I have that link to that file in there. And let’s say I wanted to put a post in here about it, I think everyone should look at it.

Adam Devereaux:

Now I could just paste the link in here, which is ugly, but a cool trick here is that I can just do a quick hyperlink by clicking the Format button, then I click the Insert link, and here is a file, and I paste the link in there insert. And now this is a link, looks a lot neater, they can click on that, and it’ll take them right to that file that is stored within this team. And as long as they have access to it, whether they are a member of the team or you’ve edited the underlying SharePoint file permissions, you can give them access to this that way. So, hopefully this helps with that in regards to, yes, the file has to be stored somewhere, but I can put access to that, link access to that in lots of different places.

Adam Devereaux:

One quick thing that I wanted to touch on while we were in here, is the Sync button. This is one other advantage with Teams is the integration with OneDrive clients and client in SharePoint. By clicking this Sync button, what that does is it works with the OneDrive client. And it basically syncs that down to my local computer, just like the OneDrive, my OneDrive would be just like a lot of other file sharing systems that you may have used like Dropbox or Box or others. So now I would have access to those files right from my file explorer, and it has some really cool capabilities around that as well.

Adam Devereaux:

So that’s a topic we’ve talked about that actually in one of our previous webinars, I’d recommend you go to our YouTube channel, YouTube, search Worksighted, Under our playlists we have our webinar playlist, it’s where we post all the recordings. And we just did one around cloud storage and went more in depth into how this works. So I’d recommend taking a look at that. All right, another question.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right, this will be our last one, and it’s a fun one. Does Teams have virtual backgrounds for video chat?

Adam Devereaux:

So, as of right now, they have blur my background, but it’s in beta testing right now to do virtual backgrounds. So, not quite as much fun as some of the other platforms that let you do Green Screen virtual background style things, but that’s actually in testing right now. So it should be out, my understanding is within the next few months, I would not have been surprised if it launched already had this mass adoption not happened. So Microsoft, like a lot of other vendors, had to reprioritize some of their development time because their platform just got absolutely massive loads of traffic to it. So they had to respond to that and make sure that it could handle it. So, things that are a little lower priority maybe got pushed down the list a little bit.

Rebecca Zaagman:

I’ll just add to that. I believe there is something called snap camera, I’ve seen people using, it’s an extension that works with your webcam from Snapchat. So, it’s integrated, but not directly through Microsoft Teams.

Adam Devereaux:

Right. Yes, there are a couple third party Apps that give you even more control over your webcam and you can do face filters, and we just had a Stand up, I think it was yesterday where somebody, they’ve been wearing … Killeen, give a shout out to Killeen, for those of you that have watched some of our other content, where he’s been wearing different funny hats every day. And he had one that it was basically like a jellyfish on his head through that App. So, pretty cool, it gives you even more capabilities than what some of those platforms can do.

Rebecca Zaagman:

All right, that’s it for questions. Let’s wrap up.

Adam Devereaux:

All right. So, again, thank you for joining. Hopefully, this was informative. Obviously, there’s a lot to talk about with Microsoft Teams, there’s a lot of different capabilities, every organization’s journey is going to be a little bit different. If you think this is something that could be useful for you or you want to have a more in depth adoption, we’d love to talk to you more about it and help you with that adoption. We’re going to have more content we create as we go forward. The core idea here is that we’re hoping to help the community find this tool to be useful and have success with it. And So we’re going to be talking to some other organizations that have been using Teams for a while now, and what their journey has looked like, what tips and tricks they may have. So look forward to that with an upcoming webinar. And with that, I’ll say goodbye and thanks again.

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