Word is spreading about Microsoft Teams in the federal government defense industry. The word is good. The consultants at Withum Digital developed a Microsoft Teams plan for a large, federal government defense contracting company.
By the end of the presentation, the company’s leadership team was both thrilled and impressed with the power of Teams and its potential to dramatically increase productivity across their organization.
Having already been setup with SharePoint 2016, the company was accustomed to some level of collaboration. Within their secure SharePoint sites, their employees have the ability to co-author, share content, engage in task tracking etc., and they do so often. However, most of the day to day communication and natural back and forth happens in Skype for Business, inside their email client, over the phone, or in person. This commonly results in unsaved conversations and undocumented information, as well as information that is simply misplaced, or lost in translation.
Like all highly classified organizations, serving our country’s defense needs, they are looking for a highly secure collaboration tool to keep their flow of communication intact.
Enter Microsoft Teams
For Microsoft 365 to be a service provider to United States Federal, State, Local, and tribal governments, as well as the organizations who hold or process data, they offer U.S. Government Community (GCC Cloud) services. Giving this plan for Teams flight is the fact that Teams is compliant with the government’s GCC Cloud (and it hopefully will be available in GCC High soon). While this is a critical need for our defense contracting company, it was the many collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Teams that really resonated with the particular needs of their organization.
It allows for content and conversations to happen in one place
As a chat-based collaboration workspace, Teams enables users to have conversations and access content from one place, in real-time. Everything related to a project, team, task, etc. is housed in a central location.
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It makes on-boarding and knowledge retention easy
Since Teams keeps a digital history and record of past documents and conversations, it is easy to onboard employees and quickly get them up to speed. When a new person joins a project, they are able to read prior message threads in a channel that are placed in context to the work item discussed.
It includes reliable remote communication capabilities.
Teams centralizes the meeting process and allows for the creation of both ad hoc and scheduled conversations through a variety of meeting capabilities. Some of those capabilities include; Meet Now meetings, Private Meetings, and one-off or recurring Team Meetings. Users can use video, have the option to enable audio only, and can securely invite external guests. Meetings can even be recorded leveraging Stream capabilities, so they can be referenced — whether someone missed the meeting, or just needs to re-watch for clarification purposes.
It gives employees secure, mobile access to vital information.
Microsoft Teams has both a desktop app that can be used in a browser, as well as a robust mobile application. In the mobile application, users can chat with their team, participate in meetings, have access to all their files etc. The Teams mobile app works extremely well, you won’t miss a beat while you are on the go.
The mission of this particular defense contracting company really focuses on staying cutting edge, and their leadership was extremely concerned with equipping their employees with the best technology, so they could better serve their clients. Their desire to pivot the culture towards one of teamwork and inclusivity shows an openness and transparency that will make their organization’s future adoption of Teams an easy process.
If you’re looking for Microsoft Teams migration and implementation help, reach out to us. Fill out our form online, or gives us a call at (240) 406-9960 to schedule a consultation to discuss your upgrade options today.
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