Successfully Manage Microsoft Teams

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Tony Redmond. I am here today to talk to you about managing Teams successfully, at least in my view. And there's no perfect recipe, there's no single recipe for managing teams. But so what I hope to do today is just give a few ideas, and then it's up to you to actually put those ideas into context for your organization. One thing you've always got to remember about the consultant-- and I've been consulting for years, and years, and years, and years, and years-- is that a consultant, no matter how experienced they are, only has 50% of the answer to any problem. The reason why is that the other 50% comes from you-- your knowledge of the company, your knowledge of office politics, which sometimes happens inside large organizations, sometimes. All of that kind of stuff-- the reasons why technology decisions were taken in the past, et cetera. You've got that. So anyway, we'll throw some ideas out. So what do I do? Well, I've been around for quite a long time. I've been an a Microsoft MVP since 2004. Right now, two major things I do. I write for petri.com twice a week about Office 365 and associated technologies. And I also have this thing called the Office 365 for IT Pros ebook, which is a book that's electronic, and it's published every month-- republished every month. We publish it on a subscription basis. And the reason why we've got to republish every month is because things change so quickly inside Office 365. And in fact, Teams is one of the apps that changes most quickly. You just have to have a look at the Office 365 Admin Center and look at the notifications that Microsoft posts there for changes. I would say, just off the top of my head, that maybe 40% of all the changes posted in Office 365 are to do with Teams right now. This app is evolving very, very quickly. And one of the reasons why it's evolving very quickly is that it's moving quite rapidly to accommodate the needs of large enterprises, because it's large enterprises where you see all the stress points. You see all the weaknesses exposed. Microsoft is doing that quite quickly. Anyway, so that's me. So my first and most important point. We're all IT professionals in the room here, so I imagine that there's a fair amount of cynicism. IT pros are cynic? No, never. Anyway, you may have noticed that Microsoft is marketing Teams quite heavily. Yeah? It's the new coming. Oh, whatever. It's a bit like Yammer was in 2014. Remember everybody was told that Yammer had to be the way to do things? If you didn't use Yammer, you weren't collaborating effectively. Well, that was 2014. Let's move on. Yammer still has its place, but I think the way I would summarize it is that Yammer was a bit of a missed opportunity for Microsoft. Teams is where their head is at right now, and they're trying to force the pace. They're trying to make people believe that Teams is the way, the truth, and the light. It's really important to them. Metrics drive behavior, and the way Microsoft people are goaled is to make people use Teams. So let's not confuse Microsoft's marketing strategy with your IT strategy. Very important point. Some of the things I want to discuss. I'd like to talk about some of the basics of Teams to make sure that we're all on the same page. But again, because we're IT professionals, everybody knows Teams, right? Who's using Teams? Would you like to give this presentation then? Sure, come on up. OK, well, I will talk to you about my impression of teams, and then you can agree or disagree with me. By the way, if you-- If I can just talk from this, I'll take over because you just invited to talk, so-- Listen, if you want to heckle, that's good. And by the way-- [INAUDIBLE] --heckling is good. Tweeting about me is also good, provided you're kind. If you're not kind, then I don't take it too nice. OK, [INAUDIBLE]. Anyway, so we'll talk a little bit about the basics of Teams. And then I want to talk about how you plan for success and how we measure and manage teams, and how we measure our success. And then we'll come to some conclusions. So it'll be quite quick. And I don't have a lot of slides, because I don't believe in killing people by PowerPoint. Some points about where Teams is right now. Clearly, this is an app, as I said earlier, very fast evolution. Launched November 2016 with general availability in March 2017. So pretty new. Big announcement recently? Teams is going to take over completely from Skype for Business Online when Skype for Business Online retires in about two years' time. According to the data released by Microsoft, Teams is used by half a million organizations. That was in April. Then they came out and they said, you know what? We've now got more active users than Slack has. So they had 13 million active users who are weekly active users, and 19 million who are active monthly. Now, the definition of what an active user is somebody who logs onto Teams and does something. They send a message. They access a file, something like that. The interesting thing I find by looking at these numbers is that if you strip out 160 organizations that Microsoft says has more than 10,000 active users, and the big one of those which is Essentia with 170,000, you actually end up with a very low number of active users per organization. It's around 26 or 27. And what's that tell us? Well, to me, it means that a lot of organizations are just starting with Teams. They're beginning their deployment. They're active, and Microsoft can pick up that activity because they're monitoring signals