Tips for Microsoft Teams

A few people have messaged or emailed about our implementation of Microsoft Teams so rather than repeat myself I've written them down in no particular order.

1) Minimal Controls. Enable your staff to create their own Teams. User adoption is centred around empowering and trusting staff. If you're still worried about Teams exploding and becoming unwieldy then reduce the storage quota right down (we chose 1Gb, if staff want more we can discuss if their use case is appropriate for teams).

2) Naming Conventions. Set a Groups naming convention and add some blocked words so that you don't have team names mirroring department mailboxes - this will cause confusion.

3) Don't keep Skype around. Aim to pull Skype as soon as you can after rolling out Teams.

4) Use Teams to promote Teams. We did a whole-org Teams Live webinar to talk about how Teams worked and then put the recording onto Stream for those who couldn't make it. This worked wonders for adoption.

5) Enhance it with Flow. Try using flow where you can to enhance a channel. For example, I set one up to post to a group each time an RSS feed is updated. We have another that posts into an updates channel each time someone modifies a list item in SharePoint.

6) Actively engage staff. Make sure you use @teamname mentions to draw in your whole team to a post. Try using @forms to create quick polls and surveys.

7) Don't repeat yourself on email. I found people were emailing me with the same questions all the time. In the end I told our teams I won't reply to emails on Office 365, you have to post your question in our Office 365 channel so everyone can see the answer - this worked really well and I got less email!

8) Mobility works. The mobile app is great, get people to ditch other apps like WhatsApp for corporate use and take advantage of push notifications from Teams for followed channels - it's just as good as WhatsApp but your corporate data remains managed.