First, who would ever have guessed that Microsoft SharePoint Conference would come back? And who would have predicted Microsoft Teams would have overtaken Slack when most of us still don’t know what it is!
In part 10 of my blog series 10 predictions for 2019: What's in store for Windows and Office 365 pros, we will dive into the re-emergence of SharePoint as a thing, the modern experience in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019, and why it’s your gateway to Microsoft Teams.
SharePoint online and on premise is modern!
Microsoft has finally given new life to SharePoint with the new modern experience in SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019. Bob German, a Partner Technical Architect for Microsoft, explains:
“Microsoft is on a mission to modernize SharePoint, to save it from fading into obscurity as a once innovative but now persnickety old war horse of a product…So last year they started phasing in new "modern" SharePoint pages based on up-to-date web technology. These pages, and sites built from them, remove decades of frustration and are a pleasure to use.”
And they have delivered. I even created a sleek looking portal that I’m actually proud to send to customers. The new experience is mobile friendly, easier to use, better performing, and it sets you up for the inevitable convergence into Microsoft Teams. Learn more about Teams.
SharePoint and Skype for Business are your gateway drugs to Microsoft Teams
If you’re unsure of what Teams is, you’re not alone. It seems to have sprang up overnight and gained quick momentum. In fact, a recent Geekwire.com survey found that Microsoft Teams has now surpassed Slack in enterprise adoption (21% to Slack’s 15%).
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app that consolidates all of the Microsoft tools you know and love in one place, making it easier to have team conversations, collaborate on shared deliverables, hold meetings, and iterate quickly on projects. With the entirety of your Office 365 environment under one roof, your users can focus on collaboration rather than on collaborating tools.
When you create a Microsoft Team, a new Office 365 group is created along with a SharePoint Online site, and Exchange Online shared mailbox and calendar, a OneNote notebook (big fan of this one!), and it ties into other Office 365 apps such as Planner and Power BI as well as non-Microsoft applications. Persistent chat and messaging capabilities along with a fully integrated voice and video experience is built in.
So what’s behind the rise in Microsoft Teams?
First, it’s built on Office 365 and leverages Azure AD identities. The meteoric rise of Office 365 adoption and the user’s comfort with the productivity tools sets up Teams nicely.
Adoption of the modern SharePoint experience also helps ease the transition. Every Team has a SharePoint team site, and every team can be added to a SharePoint team site. SharePoint maintains the repository for news and hierarchical folder content aligned to channels within Teams.
Skype for Business features and functionality are being built into Teams, with plans to replace the communications platform eventually. This past October, Microsoft began notifying their customers with fewer than 500 employees and who are using Skype for Business Online that they would be automatically migrated to Teams. It’s only a matter of time before they narrow the features gap for enterprises and move them to Teams as well.
Finally, with Microsoft Teams, you may actually use your Yammer instance. Yes, I know some of you store your tax documents in there because no one uses it. But you’ll want to stop that practice because Teams integrates Yammer so you can connect people across the organization and crowdsource ideas.
Preparing for your Microsoft Teams deployment
Microsoft is getting Teams right. So you will want to get it right too.
As you start to explore Teams this year, consider how you will manage and audit this platform, including discovering and reporting on applications, channels, files and folders, members, owners, and settings.
But even before you can report on Teams, you will want to make sure all of the content your users need is available in Teams. This includes finally migrating those crufty SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 instances to SharePoint Online. Migrating to SharePoint Online is the first step to unlocking the powerful benefits of a more modern collaboration environment.
Learn how in this upcoming webcast: Migrating between SharePoint Versions with Metalogix Content Matrix, Thursday, January 17th.
In this webcast, we’ll explore how to avoid potential migration roadblocks, including how to:
- Build a pre-migration strategy
- Move your source SharePoint environment to a newer version
- Successfully complete your migration journey without impacting users