When Microsoft launched Teams in 2017, it was viewed as a persistent chat platform looking to enter the market to position Microsoft 
in the enterprise chat space. Since its launch, Teams has been gaining momentum. Teams is now used by more than 125,000 organizations. With this level of adoption, can Teams be transformative to your workplace? Quite possibly. It is already disrupting the way work really gets done.
A Hub For Teams To Stay Connected
Out the gate, Teams provides users with the capability to have persistent chats through channels and the ability to add tabs leveraging some 30 or so apps out of the box. The basics include file storage, Planner task lists, a wiki page, and a team One Note. This doesn’t sound disruptive.
Looking at the fundamental capabilities a knowledge worker needs, one of the strengths of the Office 365 platform has been its integration with Office products. Office being ‘King’ for desktop productivity and unstructured files, it’s carried the success of many Microsoft ventures including SharePoint. Knowledge workers create files and artifacts to communicate, document, and collaborate with peers, customers, and industry. Having easier ways to store, retain, and share these knowledge assets has simply been a no brainer for the last 15 years.
Introduce external factors now at play – geographic diversity, the demands for a mobile workforce, and flex work schedules. The knowledge worker needs more to stay connected, be more efficient with their time, and continue to always hit the target. The need for collaboration and connectedness has not changed, meetings are still heavily prevalent, but tools and methods to give some of that time back is a differentiator.
The Place Where Work Gets Done
What’s the secret sauce? Teams combines all the elements of how work really gets done: chat, collaboration, documents, search, and meetings. It’s a meeting place, it’s instant messaging, it’s group threaded discussion. It’s a document management system, it’s a note taker, and integrated with any other line of business app you need.
The power of Teams is in the desktop application. It’s not just a browser based website, but like Slack and HipChat, it is providing teams with consistent means of communication that improve transparency, preserve history, and keep the team moving forward. The interface is simple, and it responds to what knowledge workers need: a single place to communicate, meet, and get work done. We see lack of adoption when users to have to login and check more than one app. Users want simplicity, their work is complex enough.
Like any of these tools from Office 365, getting started with a small team, department or group is good to put theory into practice. Understand the practical application and how it maps to cultural fit. This can be very telling for next steps in deploying Teams to additional teams. These lessons can inform feature and training requirements, as well as governance policies. A platform that combines chat, collaboration, documents and search could be just what your teams have been asking for.
Have specific questions on how to roll out Teams in your organization?
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