I’m a long-time Microsoft Teams user! I started very early, back when the preview came out and most didn’t even noticed this new product.
I think there were two reasons for me to bet on Microsoft Teams from day one:
- I never was the heavy slack Slack user. I preferred HipChat, but when I left my old company, I needed something new.
- I’m an old-school Skype (for Business) fan! I started the journey with OCS… Any questions? So, Microsoft Teams seemed like the next logical step. And now we all know: I was right with that indication.
As a benefit: I can consume many of my Office 365 services from within one application on (nearly) every platform. The beginning was not so easy! Teams was very buggy (back then), and everyone told me: “This works better in Slack” or “As long as Feature XYZ is missing, no way dude!”.
But how does all that changed my communication? The answer is simple: I’m an Apple guy, and many of my contacts have at least one Mac or an iPhone! So I use iMessage a lot, and I also used FaceTime heavily for Person-to-Person calls. The rest of my communication was done mostly in Skype for Business. Now that more and more of my contacts uses Teams things changed quickly: Today I saw, that my last FaceTime call was 6 weeks ago. Most of my communications are now based on Microsoft Teams! Calls, messages, File Sharing (OneDrive) and Meetings. And I mean lots of Meetings!!! We are a remote company, with a wide spread of engagements.
The other very positive effect: Less internal Mail! It reduced the internal mail count dramatically.
Even so, as we all know today:Microsoft Teams is much more than that! I use channels to consume a lot of RSS Feeds. One of the features I really love. And I also useMicrosoft Teams as a target for a lot of mail (mostly for notifications) and more and more as a target for notifications via WebHooks. Both reduced the mail that has flooded my inbox before. And It also reduced the number of shared mailboxes for me! That is awesome, because consuming them on a mobile device is not always fun! And since a while, the Mobile Client for Microsoft Teams is getting better, and better.
A while ago, I had an idea to improve our internal communication again! We are very agile and we have a lot of short pitches and projects: Why not firing up a Teams Team for everything? And If we don’t use them anymore lets just archive them or throw them away? First most reactions where skeptical. And this is a quote: “Now he is going nuts with Teams…”.
It took a while to find the best way to handle everything. Now we have a few workflows that do all the dirty work (mostly, PowerShell based automation with a few Flow elements) for us, and the usage of Teams increased again. Any with usage, I mean real usage and not just the number of teams and channels.
And the guy I quoted above now owns more teams and is far more active in channels than I am.
If you are stocked on mail only communication in your team(s) and/or if you need a better communication platform: Evaluate Microsoft Teams! If you have an Office 365 subscription, you might already have it! Even if not: There is a free version (some call it freemium), with a few limitations, that you can use. It’s a smart way to try a modern Unified Communications platform that was built from ground up for Collaboration: UC&C
Disclaimer: We do a lot of projects related to Office 365 and UC&C (based on Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams) but this post if not meant as advertising, not a promotion in any kind, and I’m not sponsored by Microsoft. As you might see: There are no links in this article…
It’s just part of the story how Microsoft Teams totally changed our internal communication and collaboration.
It is a journey; we still try to optimise things, and we also think about more of these “crazy ideas” how to simplify things. We are not there yet…