With the current pandemic of COVID-19, many people are working outside of their normal office and are needing to stay connected to co-workers. For a lot of organizations, this means they are using Microsoft Teams. Some organizations have been using Microsoft Teams for a while and some very abruptly started their journey.
As the year comes to an end we commonly look back and reflect on the good things that have happened to us. I thought it would be a good time to look back on Microsoft Teams and re-cap some of the great features that have come to the platform this year. This list was put together based on either my value of an item’s importance and/or what I've heard from the community (through social media, talking to people at user groups, etc.). If you think I've missed something, please feel free to add to the discussion on Twitter.
One of the concerns many companies have when they start looking at Microsoft Teams reporting is how to control the creation of new Teams. The more Teams that are created, the more administrative overhead is needed. By having lots of Teams, it can be hard for end-users to find the right Team to contribute to and IT Pro’s are stuck having to filter through the Teams to find the one they need to support.
Teams is Microsoft’s collaboration hub within Office 365. Teams was originally introduced as a direct answer to Slack, but it’s become a much bigger solution than that over the last two years it has been publicly available within Office 365.
Recent reports have shown that Teams is gaining a lot of momentum within the enterprise. According to the survey from Spiceworks, about 21% of the respondents were using Microsoft Teams compared to 15% using Slack. Although the sample size (901 respondents) is too small to represent the entire market, it clearly shows an upward trend. Given its popularity, it’s not uncommon to see that Teams is also used within organizations that haven’t fully migrated to Office 365 (yet). However, the use of Teams in a hybrid deployment is bound to a couple of restrictions.
If your familiar with my writing, you know I'm a huge proponent of Office 365 administrators learning and using PowerShell. While it may be true that some admin tasks are easier to accomplish with a GUI, I'm strongly of the opinion that doing as much as possible in PowerShell will help build invaluable skills.
“The king is dead; long live the king!” is a traditional proclamation made following the ascension of a new monarch to the throne in various countries (both real and fictional). The recent announcement at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft Teams is taking over for Skype brings this phase to mind—is Skype dead? Let’s dig into what Microsoft has announced and is currently doing to see if we can figure out what the future holds.
In Part 1 of this series, we covered the basics of the Collaboration choices available in Office 365. Before you say it, I know I didn’t include SharePoint Online in Part 1, and I won’t cover it in Part 2 either. Although Microsoft lists it as a collaboration tool, I don’t really agree. I see SharePoint Online as a method or landscape to store data that has rich features for document management, such as versioning, views, check in/out, etc. For me, collaboration requires more than document management. I know many of you reading this will disagree with me, and that is okay. If it works for you, then use it!
More than likely, you are an email admin, with deep experience in Exchange. Maybe you have recently migrated to Exchange Online, and are thinking “Hey, I know how to collaborate in Exchange, so what’s the big fuss about.” Let review where we have been and where Office 365 is headed.
I have spent most of the last six years of my professional life configuring Exchange hybrid deployments for organizations looking to move their email into Office 365. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has set it up repeatedly, Exchange hybrid is pretty straight forward. You take your on-premises Exchange organization and run the Hybrid Connectivity Wizard (HCW) to connect to Office 365. I suppose there is more to it than that, but this blog post is not the place to go into those details.