M365 - Microsoft Teams Center

An integral part of Microsoft Teams is the ability to attend meetings and live events. The appointments for these event types are usually planned directly via the personal calendar in a Microsoft Teams client. The calendar also enables quick and easy participation in meetings.

Yes, you read that right. The title is not a question or suggestion, but a statement of fact: Your approach to Microsoft Teams governance is wrong.

Right now, you must be thinking I have some serious chutzpah to make such a statement, and you’d be correct – but that chutzpah is built on real-world experience working with organizations of all sizes and industries. 

With the COVID-19 situation impacting the world in 2020, many, if not all, learning institutes are turning to remote learning and some schools and education institutes are leveraging tools such as Microsoft Teams.

Hello from the bunker! I assume most of you will be reading this blog post from my future, and hopefully the world has returned to something closer to “normal”. By normal, I mean there isn’t a pandemic going on and people can leave their houses. As I write this blog post, I am about a month into the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and I haven’t left my house except for trips to the grocery store for what feels like about 20 years.

Teams is Microsoft’s collaboration hub within Office 365. Teams was originally introduced as a direct answer to Slack, but it’s become a much bigger solution than that over the last two years it has been publicly available within Office 365.

“The king is dead; long live the king!” is a traditional proclamation made following the ascension of a new monarch to the throne in various countries (both real and fictional). The recent announcement at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft Teams is taking over for Skype brings this phase to mind—is Skype dead? Let’s dig into what Microsoft has announced and is currently doing to see if we can figure out what the future holds.

In Part 1 of this series, we covered the basics of the Collaboration choices available in Office 365. Before you say it, I know I didn’t include SharePoint Online in Part 1, and I won’t cover it in Part 2 either. Although Microsoft lists it as a collaboration tool, I don’t really agree. I see SharePoint Online as a method or landscape to store data that has rich features for document management, such as versioning, views, check in/out, etc. For me, collaboration requires more than document management. I know many of you reading this will disagree with me, and that is okay. If it works for you, then use it!

More than likely, you are an email admin, with deep experience in Exchange. Maybe you have recently migrated to Exchange Online, and are thinking “Hey, I know how to collaborate in Exchange, so what’s the big fuss about.” Let review where we have been and where Office 365 is headed.