Microsoft Teams - Replace all the things
Discussion
Has anyone made the switch yet? Are you using it for everything (file storage, project work, VOIP, etc) or just parts of it?
I started with a new company last month and my boss is quite interested in us moving to it. It's fallen to myself and a colleague to investigate and probably deliver it.
I've done quite a bit of reading and testing so far and I'm quite impressed. We already pay for Office 365 with a hybrid E3/E5 package and are using Exchange Online (praise the Lord). We're still using old school mapped drives from an onsite file server and use Skype for Business for our VOIP (both deskphones and onscreen clients/IMs).
We've started using it internally in the IT department and the only real issue I've run into is the "all or nothing" permission system when it comes to actual Teams. We have a number of use cases where department head A needs a private workspace (which can be their OneDrive), a subfolder that only A&B can access, another that only A&C should be able to access and another where A,B&C should have access. You get the idea. I know they're supposedly working on "Private" channels for Teams that can have assigned access but that's been in the works for a long time. The only solution now is a separate Team for each area of access which is going to receive push back.
Interested to hear anyone's experiences thus far.
I started with a new company last month and my boss is quite interested in us moving to it. It's fallen to myself and a colleague to investigate and probably deliver it.
I've done quite a bit of reading and testing so far and I'm quite impressed. We already pay for Office 365 with a hybrid E3/E5 package and are using Exchange Online (praise the Lord). We're still using old school mapped drives from an onsite file server and use Skype for Business for our VOIP (both deskphones and onscreen clients/IMs).
We've started using it internally in the IT department and the only real issue I've run into is the "all or nothing" permission system when it comes to actual Teams. We have a number of use cases where department head A needs a private workspace (which can be their OneDrive), a subfolder that only A&B can access, another that only A&C should be able to access and another where A,B&C should have access. You get the idea. I know they're supposedly working on "Private" channels for Teams that can have assigned access but that's been in the works for a long time. The only solution now is a separate Team for each area of access which is going to receive push back.
Interested to hear anyone's experiences thus far.
Still has a way to go imo.
In my place its a free for all and everyone is creating siloed teams with no structure or thought - so fast forward 12 months and nobody will be able to find info because the two or three people in the team are on holiday, sick or left.
Right now we are creating a team per project, which will include project managers, consultants, maybe tech presales, maybe the client, maybe sales. If you are not in the team you can't see the info which you may want to reference on another job or to deal with an escalation or query.
Whereas it might be better to have one team per client with channels for projects or maybe one team for delivery/ps and a channel for each client or project. I think it needs a way to create nested channels.
The product needs more work to work in enterprise and needs more controls to enforce a sensible way of using it and prevent people cresting endless teams, many of which seem to overlap
As much as I dislike sharepoint, it's the only answer with o365 for now.
In my place its a free for all and everyone is creating siloed teams with no structure or thought - so fast forward 12 months and nobody will be able to find info because the two or three people in the team are on holiday, sick or left.
Right now we are creating a team per project, which will include project managers, consultants, maybe tech presales, maybe the client, maybe sales. If you are not in the team you can't see the info which you may want to reference on another job or to deal with an escalation or query.
Whereas it might be better to have one team per client with channels for projects or maybe one team for delivery/ps and a channel for each client or project. I think it needs a way to create nested channels.
The product needs more work to work in enterprise and needs more controls to enforce a sensible way of using it and prevent people cresting endless teams, many of which seem to overlap
As much as I dislike sharepoint, it's the only answer with o365 for now.
Teams like most MS stuff is half baked and pretty s
te tbh.
Btw you don’t store files in it. Teams is just a different view of Shareapoint. But with a chat mode and the ability to show a webpage of certain other paid for products.
Trouble is he desktop client is ste. Too many teams and channels become a huge mess. It’s hard to find files as it creates a zillion places to put them.
It partly integrated with you outlook calendar and spams you with more and too many notifications. Yet doesn’t have any integration for your email.
Also why on Earth would you want a single place to view dashboard of other products. You already have one place. It’s called an Operating System. Or at the very least a web browser.
I’m not in anyway defending Skype as that drops packets more of than Hermes. But Teams as a concept just seems to be answering a question nobody has ever asked.
te tbh. Btw you don’t store files in it. Teams is just a different view of Shareapoint. But with a chat mode and the ability to show a webpage of certain other paid for products.
Trouble is he desktop client is s
te. Too many teams and channels become a huge mess. It’s hard to find files as it creates a zillion places to put them. It partly integrated with you outlook calendar and spams you with more and too many notifications. Yet doesn’t have any integration for your email.
Also why on Earth would you want a single place to view dashboard of other products. You already have one place. It’s called an Operating System. Or at the very least a web browser.
I’m not in anyway defending Skype as that drops packets more of than Hermes. But Teams as a concept just seems to be answering a question nobody has ever asked.
eliot said:
Still has a way to go imo.
In my place its a free for all and everyone is creating siloed teams with no structure or thought - so fast forward 12 months and nobody will be able to find info because the two or three people in the team are on holiday, sick or left.
Right now we are creating a team per project, which will include project managers, consultants, maybe tech presales, maybe the client, maybe sales. If you are not in the team you can't see the info which you may want to reference on another job or to deal with an escalation or query.
Whereas it might be better to have one team per client with channels for projects or maybe one team for delivery/ps and a channel for each client or project. I think it needs a way to create nested channels.
The product needs more work to work in enterprise and needs more controls to enforce a sensible way of using it and prevent people cresting endless teams, many of which seem to overlap
As much as I dislike sharepoint, it's the only answer with o365 for now.
The Free for All is a concern. Any deployment will definitely have to be accompanied by some documentation, policy and user training regarding the management and creation of the Teams but it's easy to see how that could get out of control even with that in place.In my place its a free for all and everyone is creating siloed teams with no structure or thought - so fast forward 12 months and nobody will be able to find info because the two or three people in the team are on holiday, sick or left.
Right now we are creating a team per project, which will include project managers, consultants, maybe tech presales, maybe the client, maybe sales. If you are not in the team you can't see the info which you may want to reference on another job or to deal with an escalation or query.
Whereas it might be better to have one team per client with channels for projects or maybe one team for delivery/ps and a channel for each client or project. I think it needs a way to create nested channels.
The product needs more work to work in enterprise and needs more controls to enforce a sensible way of using it and prevent people cresting endless teams, many of which seem to overlap
As much as I dislike sharepoint, it's the only answer with o365 for now.
I watched a webinar earlier from a Microsoft employee and his left pane was filled with endless amounts of Teams.
I've been looking at Sharepoint online too and it solves a lot of our current problems (version control, access outside the network, reduction in hardware costs) but I feel it might increase workload for the IT department. It's also nowhere near as intuitive from an end user perspective (the company is in the logistics/freight business - ease of use is a big factor for buy in). Skype for Business appears to be on the way out in the not too distance future and we'll end up with Teams for VOIP by necessity.
Manager doesn't expect it to happen until end of this year at the earliest (a number of business critical projects in the pipeline before then) so I'm hoping enterprise functionality will improve before then.
300bhp/ton said:
When you create a Team in Teams all it does is create a Sharepoint site in the background.
Hmm; That sounds like issues waiting to happen.Having been using it at work, I often revert to old fashioned Skype as it's far more user friendly for just sneding a message to an individual and being done with it.
zoom https://zoom.us/ is probably the best platform for Unified Comms. If you need to share documents then https://www.box.com is great for teams. Anything MS is usually hard work for everyone.
YorkshireWhisky said:
zoom https://zoom.us/ is probably the best platform for Unified Comms. If you need to share documents then https://www.box.com is great for teams. Anything MS is usually hard work for everyone.
£££s.We already have the O365 cost and honestly now that I don't have to support an Exchange or Sharepoint server, I almost don't hate Microsoft any more
Skype for Business works perfectly for us and the integration with Office Online and ease of administration is a god send (coming from someone that used to support Cisco UC/Webex). As far as I can tell we can switch everyone's "phones" from Skype to Teams with a few checkboxes in the admin centre. No new contracts, vendors, or costs.
Teams is basically the wild west terms of enterprise controls for teams, channels and content, good luck finding anything three months later. Think about how you want to deploy it, write a guide (or ten) and then prepare to manually enforce policy including zero tolerance on rouge teams and channels.
Files? well they live on fileserver not in your pet teams repository that no one will be able to find later, unless a working and uncontrolled draft. Maybe if your really organised and have a good cloud backup strategy in place then they can live on sharepoint online once ready for public consumption.
However as skype / lync alternative and replacement there is nothing to fault it.
Files? well they live on fileserver not in your pet teams repository that no one will be able to find later, unless a working and uncontrolled draft. Maybe if your really organised and have a good cloud backup strategy in place then they can live on sharepoint online once ready for public consumption.
However as skype / lync alternative and replacement there is nothing to fault it.
I like the idea of setting up a "team" for a project and aligning the storage and access permissions to the content from that team membership. Ideally it would be tied to a group in AD that could be administrated by a team captain / admin group. Not sure if the architecture is there yet though.
The possibility of folding document management, permissioning and control into a single platform, along with the collaboration benefits is very enticing.
The possibility of folding document management, permissioning and control into a single platform, along with the collaboration benefits is very enticing.
300bhp/ton said:
krisdelta said:
The possibility of folding document management, permissioning and control into a single platform, along with the collaboration benefits is very enticing.
Why?I don't really understand all the fuss over collaboration apps, I've heard people talking up teams like it is the best thing in the world and there is nothing out there like it.
I've also heard the exact same things about slack, but seemingly everyone slags off google chat. Personally all I can see is they are much of a muchness, and no matter what a company uses you somehow you always seem to get dragged into joining a bunch WhatsApp groups on your personal phone.
I've also heard the exact same things about slack, but seemingly everyone slags off google chat. Personally all I can see is they are much of a muchness, and no matter what a company uses you somehow you always seem to get dragged into joining a bunch WhatsApp groups on your personal phone.
ging84 said:
I don't really understand all the fuss over collaboration apps, I've heard people talking up teams like it is the best thing in the world and there is nothing out there like it.
I've also heard the exact same things about slack, but seemingly everyone slags off google chat. Personally all I can see is they are much of a muchness, and no matter what a company uses you somehow you always seem to get dragged into joining a bunch WhatsApp groups on your personal phone.
This never, ever happens I've also heard the exact same things about slack, but seemingly everyone slags off google chat. Personally all I can see is they are much of a muchness, and no matter what a company uses you somehow you always seem to get dragged into joining a bunch WhatsApp groups on your personal phone.
untakenname said:
The only mildly impressive thing I've found about teams is the blurred background when video calling, Microsoft is pushing Teams hard but I doubt it will replace skype for business unless they do what they did with Lync.
They've already started phasing it out from some new O365 packages.I work for a large American multinational and we have been using Teams and Yammer for a while, along with a migration to O365, although I still use traditional Office. As said, Teams is ok to a degree, but the lack of granularity in security is a pain. It’s nice to quickly set up a channel for a project or whatever, but every folder inside seems to have the same settings, unless I’m missing something. Yammer is even more of a free for all. It’s ok now, but trying to find something in the future will become more difficult as the search is lousy. The mobile apps are OK though, and also having my local files in OneDrive is good too.
We don’t get a choice of tools, so we just need to make the best of it.
We don’t get a choice of tools, so we just need to make the best of it.
I'm thinking a hybrid Teams/Sharepoint Online approach might be best.
The folder structure on our current network storage is quite static so I might just mirror that across to Sharepoint online, move everything across and link the Sharepoint site to user's file explorers using the OneDrive app.
That way we get the benefits and the User won't really notice any difference.
Teams can be used by Sales/Commercial for projects and then maybe a company policy set so that finalised documents are stored in Sharepoint in the relevant location to make review at a later date simpler than crawling through Teams.
The folder structure on our current network storage is quite static so I might just mirror that across to Sharepoint online, move everything across and link the Sharepoint site to user's file explorers using the OneDrive app.
That way we get the benefits and the User won't really notice any difference.
Teams can be used by Sales/Commercial for projects and then maybe a company policy set so that finalised documents are stored in Sharepoint in the relevant location to make review at a later date simpler than crawling through Teams.
untakenname said:
The only mildly impressive thing I've found about teams is the blurred background when video calling, Microsoft is pushing Teams hard but I doubt it will replace skype for business unless they do what they did with Lync.
My understanding is that teams will replace sfb.Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff