By now, we’ve all heard that Microsoft Teams has completely taken the place of Skype for Business Online. Even those still using Skype for Business on-premises should start planning their move to Teams – when, how fast, and who will be involved? We’ve thoroughly explored these questions in How to Manage Your Journey from Skype for Business to Teams. However, what’s often missing is the why. Why should an organization switch to Teams – what are the benefits, and what does the tool actually do?
Office 365 Integration – Streamlining Communication
First of all – the move to Microsoft Teams is somewhat of a no-brainer if you are already an Office 365 customer because the platform is affordable for most business and enterprise and the integration is streamlined. However, I say somewhat because Gartner likens this transition to the same scale as when Outlook first arrived (a rather large undertaking to say the least) – you can view their full on-demand webinar to get an inside look at how to best roll out Teams.
Centralization is the key theme of why organizations are transitioning away from Skype for Business. Inside the centralized Teams application, you can house documents, contact and communicate with colleagues, and organize notes all without having to change applications or minimize the Teams client and use Microsoft Explorer.
Teams also keep the lines of communication flowing by maintaining in-line conversation – if you’ve moved away from Teams for a bit to work on something else you can pick up right where you left off in the conversation without having to sift through mounds of unrelated email threads.
Security – Mobile Device Management
Teams is backed by Microsoft so security is a key component in many of the features. Corporate data is what is at stake inside of Teams and Microsoft leverages Intune in Office 365 allow users to access the data from any device while still maintaining compliance. However Intune isn’t obligatory, and you can manage your Office 365 apps without it.
Intune protects and manages the devices your employees use, the mobile applications used to access the data, allows for sharing rules to be put in place to manage how the data is used, and parameters can be set to ensure the applications and devices are compliant within the range of corporate security rules.
Actual Collaboration – whether Microsoft built it or not
Probably one of the best reasons to move to Teams is due to its potential becoming reality faster than we think. Teams is built so that you can put all of the tools you love to use to do your work (Microsoft-based or not) all in one place.
In fact, there is even a Microsoft Teams application store to make moving these apps to Teams even easier. Again, this enhances productivity because all of the information that you need to create, share or reference on a daily basis is in one single location.
Convincing your end users to make the move
Of course, the only way to garner adoption is to actually deploy Teams in the organization and ensure you have power users that push everyone else to the platform.
“Can you email me that document? No, it’s in Teams here (reference your channel).”
“Can you email me that document? No, it’s in Teams here (reference your channel).”
“Can you Skype for a minute?” This won’t be a question any longer as teammates will simply see who is online in Teams and chat or video chat from Teams.
“Can you re-forward that email to me?” Again, not necessary because if you’re actively working in Teams on a project the conversation history will maintain current conversations with easy search for attached documents and items.
No tool is perfect, there is still a ways to go for Teams to be the ultimate collaboration platform but there is a definite reason WHY users are moving towards Teams and why organizations should be planning today for their move away from Skype from Business.