Microsoft Teams is quickly growing among enterprise businesses as a collaboration platform of choice. The reason is obvious: most enterprises use Microsoft in some way already, for basic email, O365, or SharePoint. From here, it’s natural to consider expanding to the Teams platform for chat, file sharing, and more.

How does Teams stack up? And what should you watch out for? We asked our top collaboration experts to share their best practices and tips for Microsoft Teams, including:

• How to make the best decision for your business

• Platform strengths and weaknesses

• Deployment considerations for security, networking, voice technology and more

Read on for their expert feedback. 

Burwood Group Microsoft Teams Experts

Our collaboration consulting team includes expertise in design, deployment, integration, and training for the Microsoft Teams platform.

Microsoft Teams is a business communication platform developed by Microsoft. From a competitive standpoint, it’s comparable to Slack or Google’s G Suite. Teams is part of their Microsoft 365 (M365) family of products (which includes Microsoft Office, Windows 10, and more). 

Microsoft Teams’ purpose is to facilitate team collaboration in a single place. The platform’s primary capabilities include: 

• Chat: Teams includes group or one-to-one messaging including GIFs and emojis.

• Meetings: You can enable video conferencing for groups of any size, from two to 10,000 participants.

• Calling: Teams is not only a collaboration platform, but a UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) platform as well. You can make and receive calls directly within Teams, including some advanced features like call transfers, cloud voicemail, and group calling.

• Collaboration: Within Teams you are able to store, share, and edit files within the platform using Microsoft Office apps (Excel, Word, etc.).

Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based platform. It is also a software as a service (SaaS) platform, with a monthly cost per user pricing structure. But because of its foundation in the Microsoft 365 platform suite, Microsoft has made the choice to include Teams access for “free” to enterprises already signed up for M365 licensing. With many enterprises already investing in Microsoft licensing, this makes Teams special: it’s ready-to-go at no additional cost for many businesses. 

This “already included” access has been a blessing and a curse for many enterprises. On one hand, companies can rollout an enterprise-grade collaboration platform at little-to-no additional cost. On the other hand, an informal or hasty rollout can lead to challenges with user comprehension, system governance, and long term system success. 

The need for a reliable communication platform for work-from-home employees has increased exponentially. We don’t see this need going away. Many companies are choosing a future that includes a permanent, hybrid approach to in-office and work-from-home employees. 

If you’re planning to support remote workers for the foreseeable future, UCaaS functionality is especially ideal for facilitating employee collaboration. When you use Teams to replace your voice system for some or all workers, you eliminate the need for an on-premises voice infrastructure and phones. 

Before you begin evaluating Teams, make sure you know: 

• What is your current investment in Microsoft enterprise licensing? Is Teams included, or would it require additional Microsoft costs? 

• What capabilities are critical to your end users in a collaboration platform? Chat, voice, etc. 

• What applications do your users already use that must be able to integrate with Teams? For example, Microsoft Teams can integrate with your existing VoIP infrastructure (or replace it, if you desire). 

As with all SaaS applications, Microsoft Teams users and administrators have developed their own opinions of the platform’s success and usability. Based on our experience as users and deployment/integration experts, we believe the following pros and cons are worth highlighting. 

Document Collaboration: Teams provides an excellent experience for document editing and real-time, simultaneous collaboration among users. It leverages all of the Microsoft Office 365 apps that most enterprise users are familiar with (Word, Excel, and more). 

Integration Capabilities: The platform integrates very well with other systems such as WebEx, Zoom, and Salesforce.This enables enterprises to create seamless business processes that enhance user productivity and customer success. If you want to use Teams as a UCaaS platform, it can work in a hybrid format, integrated with your on-premises voice infrastructure. 

The All-Important Search Bar: The Teams file and data organizational structure is heavily reliant on the interface’s universal search bar. This can be challenging for end users who are used to a more traditional file folder structure and search system. 

Upfront Deployment Work: If your IT team doesn’t put upfront effort into planning Teams governance, structure, and user training, the system can very easily get out of control from a permissions and data sprawl perspective. 

Fast and Furious Feature Rollout: Microsoft is quickly introducing new functionalities to the platform. This is great, but can also be challenging for administrators who are trying to keep users educated and using best practices. For the latest look at new developments, we recommend checking out their M365 Roadmap. 

Whether you are new to Microsoft’s suite of products or you are treating Teams as a potential add-on to your already large Microsoft investment, there are important best practices to follow in your deployment process. Based on our experience working with various enterprises and Teams deployments, we’ve compiled a list of six Teams deployment best practices to keep in mind in your Teams journey. 

1. Security

2. Voice

3. Contact Center

4. Collaboration Spaces and Rooms

5. Network

6. User Training

When you deploy Teams to your users, you’ll typically see an influx of users experimenting with the platform. One of the first issues we see is a real lack of auditing. Users are creating teams, creating channels, and adding content at an exponential rate. As this continues, you’ll see an increasing number of abandoned and duplicative teams in your platform. 

We highly recommend creating an audit process and cycle. Something as straightforward as checking team names for possible duplications and reaching out to stakeholders for help cleaning up on a regular cycle can keep the system from sprawling out of control. 

In addition to system auditing, you should know that Microsoft Teams has inherent security features that many administrators overlook. For example, the data loss prevention (DLP) governance policy is easy to turn on with minimal upfront work. If you have to meet a compliance requirement like PCI or HIPAA, this tool looks for data patterns to ensure you aren’t leaking sensitive information like credit card data.

In general: doing a little upfront work to plan team and channel structure guidelines and security feature turnup will go a long way. 

Most Teams deployments begin with chat and document sharing as the primary functions, with some users trying out ad hoc video calls internally. From here, you can mature your system by expanding to voice functionality. There are two categories of using Teams for voice: 

If you’re considering using Teams for some flavor of voice replacement, a gradual roadmap is possible. For example, Burwood works with many clients to integrate their Cisco voice and Microsoft Teams platforms for a hybrid, successful solution. 

Microsoft Teams is not a Contact Center solution. It has some contact center-like functionality like call queuing and auto attendant, but we don’t consider this to be a mature contact center solution. 

If you need a solution that provides a high level of consumer self-service and integration with backend data systems, you should consider a separate contact center application that can integrate with Teams (such as Cisco or RingCentral). Some integrations allow you to leverage Teams as the softphone, and there’s even the opportunity to embed contact center functions in Teams. This enables agents to live in Teams as their hub, but still rely on the contact center application functionality. And from a management perspective, your contact center solution will provide workforce management, call reporting, and more. 

There are two ways to outfit a collaboration space with Microsoft Teams:

The Teams default configuration is limited. There is a small range of 24 ports for meetings and traffic is all marked the same without distinction between voice/video/content. You’ll want to do some immediate out-of-the-box optimization, especially if you are planning to use Teams for enterprise voice. 

Our on-demand YouTube webinar provides a great, technical breakdown of the network requirements and recommendations for Teams functionality. We highly recommend watching this 10-minute segment beginning at minute 40:00 in the video. 

It’s easy to become consumed with the technology considerations and decisions relating to your Teams deployments. But we have to remember that Teams deployment success is measured by user adoption and experience. 

Rather than save user training for the end of the rollout, it’s critical to keep the user in mind throughout the entire deployment process. We highly recommend planning for user training well before deployment. Identify champions throughout business units to spearhead adoption and build out a Microsoft Teams site dedicated to training materials. Consider this iterative, cyclical process: 

Microsoft Teams is a robust, enterprise-grade collaboration platform. When you weigh the potential benefits to your organization, take into consideration all of the following:

• Your current Microsoft licensing investment

• Your expected feature roadmap, from chat to enterprise voice and more

• Your ability to create a positive user experience, including training programs and ongoing governance

In today’s business climate, an enterprise collaboration toolset is non-negotiable. Weigh these considerations to make a decision that will positively impact your IT strategy, your users, and ultimately your enterprise customers and revenues. 

As a Microsoft Gold Partner and Azure Cloud Platform Expert, Burwood’s Microsoft consulting team includes experts who can evaluate your current licensing model, explore integration possibilities, and create governance and training programs. 

Not sure where to begin? Burwood offers a complementary, two-hour Microsoft Teams Strategy Workshop. In this free session with your team, we will:

• Discuss your current state: deployment, consideration, and end-user adoption

• Share best practices we’ve learned from similar client environments

• Recommend specific next steps for your organization

Contact us to book your workshop today. 

May 6, 2021