Part 6
IN THIS PART …
Find out how Teams works well for solo business owners and how to make the most of Teams for small and medium-sized organizations.
Learn how to scale Teams as your business grows and see why the most important aspect of success with Teams is a fast Internet connection.
Dig deeper into enterprise-specific scenarios and where to go next when using Teams in large organizations.
Look at some of the advanced features of Teams, such as Cloud Voice, compliance, and reporting.
Discover how you can leverage Teams for shift-based work and how Teams can be used in the education, healthcare, consulting, and government industries.
Chapter 15
IN THIS CHAPTER
Discovering the value of Teams for solo business owners
Adopting Teams for small and medium-sized organizations
Making the most of Teams no matter the size of your business
Learning from the experiences of others
Small and medium-sized organizations have always been in a tricky situation when it comes to enterprise-grade products. Most organizations start out with just a small group of people or even a single person. The tools you use as an individual are vastly different than the tools you will need when you grow and expand to become a large enterprise. Microsoft Teams was designed to be scalable. The way you use Teams as a small or medium-sized business will be different than the way you use it as you grow.
In this chapter, you learn about using Teams in small and medium-sized organizations. You learn some of the tips and tricks that work for using Teams as a sole proprietor all the way up to a medium-sized organization with up to 250 people. You learn how to get started with Teams, how to adopt Teams, and how to scale up as your organization grows. First, though, you need to look at your Internet connection. We start this chapter there.
Focusing on the Internet
By far, the most important aspect of having a good experience with Teams no matter the size of your business is your Internet connection. Teams is a cloud-based service so all communications outside your local network travel over the Internet. The way Teams sends data over the Internet is heavily optimized; however, video and audio calls still require a lot of data to be transferred back and forth. If you have a slow Internet connection, your calls will be choppy and your video will freeze and jump. In short, a poor Internet connection will make Teams a very painful experience.
Microsoft Teams also sends data between devices on your local network in a peer-to-peer fashion. This traffic can be substantial for large enterprises (which I talk about in Chapter 16). With small and medium-sized organizations, most off-the-shelf network gear will be more than enough. If your organization is to the size where you have a network engineer who is responsible for your internal network, it is worth having this person take a look at the network section of Chapter 16.
Microsoft has tons of graphs and tables and charts to help organizations ensure their Internet connection can provide a good experience for Teams. I go into these in more detail in Chapter 16 because larger organizations have more complicated networks and Internet connections. For small and medium-sized organizations, you likely have minimal options when it comes to your Internet connection.
In general, my recommendation is to look for a connection that has at least 2 megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth per person in your location who will be using Teams. Microsoft states that Teams can deliver high-definition (HD) video quality over a bandwidth as low as 1.2 Mbps; however, I have noticed it is better to be on the safe side with 2 Mbps. For example, if you have five people working in your office and you will all be making calls on Teams, look for at least a 10 Mbps Internet connection.
Figure 15-1 shows the Internet options available for a company called WaveG in Seattle. Note the options call out symmetrical speeds. This means the bandwidth advertised is available in both directions (in other words, sending data from your computer to the Internet and receiving data from the Internet to your computer). Symmetric speeds are important because Teams sends data in both directions for video and audio calls. However, if both upload and download speeds are fast enough, then you don’t need to worry about symmetric connection speeds. For example, you might have gigabit download speeds, which could accommodate a massive amount of traffic and only 30 Mbps upload speed. Even though you only have 30 Mbps upload speed, this would be plenty for a ten-person organization.
FIGURE 15-1: An example of Internet connectivity options.
Be sure to check both upload and download bandwidth speeds when reviewing Internet connection offers. Some companies offer blazing fast download speeds and very slow upload speeds. This is because applications, such as video streaming services, predominately use download bandwidth and don’t need a very fast upload speed. Teams data flows both up and down from your computer to the Internet, so you need to make sure your bandwidth accommodates both directions.
A gigabit is a thousand megabits. Gigabit Internet connections are becoming increasingly common in major cities. Rejoice if you have this type of bandwidth available in your area. Many rural areas struggle with even basic Internet connectivity.
Understanding How Teams Fits Your Organization
There is no hard and fast rule about the size of an organization and how you should use Teams. I have had a lot of experience with organizations of all sizes, and by observing how each uses Teams, I have discovered a general evolutionary path most organizations follow in their journey with Teams. I like to break down small and medium-sized organizations into three buckets based on the number of employees, as shown in Figure 15-2.
FIGURE 15-2: Grouping small and medium-sized organizations.
Many organizations start out as a single person or a person with a partner — a one- or two-person organization. The way this type of organization uses Teams is specific to that size.
The next evolution in using Teams occurs when an organization has between 2 and 25 people. It is just big enough to start thinking about having someone designated as the Teams administrator, but still small enough that everyone knows what is going on with everyone else.
The next stage in the Teams journey is when an organization grows to 25 to 250 people. I think of these as medium-sized organizations. In these organizations, there are enough people that not everyone knows what is going on with everyone else, and there are enough duties that the roles and how people use Teams need to be defined. Also, this is where governance starts to take shape.
Let’s take a look at how each type of organization can use and benefit from Teams.
Keeping it simple (1 or 2 people)
Teams is valuable for even a single-person organization. You can invite guests to your teams to collaborate and communicate and use it to set up meetings and conference calls. As a solo practitioner or a two-person organization, you can keep things simple. You don’t need to worry about setting permissions for yourself or your partner because you will be an administrator over the entire Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription and all services within the subscription.
Though you won’t need to worry about permissions, you will need to become familiar with basic administration tasks. (I cover basic administration throughout the book in the relevant chapters and then go into depth on the Teams Admin Center in Chapter 13 and Chapter 14.) In addition, you will need to spend time in the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 administration centers for your subscription and be familiar with the administration of other services you can leverage through Teams such as SharePoint. These topics are significant enough to fill books on their own — check out Office 365 For Dummies (Wiley) and SharePoint For Dummies (Wiley) for more information.
As a single or two-person organization, it is important to also focus your learning on guest access, as nearly everyone you talk with through Teams (aside from your partner if you have one) will be a guest. (I cover guest access in Chapter 7.) Larger organizations often only communicate with other people within the organization. If you are a solo practitioner, you will be exclusively communicating with people outside your organization unless you tend to chat with yourself, which I have been known to do myself from time to time.
Pay attention to the process around inviting guest users into your teams, channels, and chats. One area I have seen organizations of all sizes struggle with is in document collaboration. Teams puts a heavy emphasis on collaboration with people inside your organization. For people outside your organization, you need to pay attention to how Teams behaves, which I outline in Chapter 7.
Also pay attention to where you are sharing a file with guest users. Guest users don’t have access to back-end storage locations like SharePoint by default. A good example of a “gotcha” here is when you share a file with a guest user in a chat. I have gotten caught in situations where there were three copies of the same file and nobody knew which one was the one source of truth. I had a copy of the document in my OneDrive, another copy was in the back-end SharePoint site for the team, and yet another copy was in the SharePoint site of the organization. At some point I saved a copy to my local computer, too! It took making some minor changes to the file over a conference call to get the file back to where it needed to be. In short, the way Teams displays files from various cloud locations is not always obvious, especially when dealing with guest users who have limited access to back-end storage locations like SharePoint.
Finally, I have found that conference calls and phone numbers are incredibly valuable to organizations of all sizes, and the same value applies to a one- or two-person organization as well. You can sign up for voice services and obtain a phone number, toll-free number, and conference call numbers just like the largest enterprise organization.
Taking your organization to the next level (2 to 25 people)
When an organization reaches between 2 and 25 people, you need to start thinking about scaling some of the duties in Teams as well as separating teams between internal users and guest users. Organizations of this size are still small enough that it is straightforward to keep track of your teams and channels. It is also common for this size organization to only have a handful of teams, and for everyone in the organization to be part of every team. When you reach this size, however, you might want to consider separating teams out into teams that include guest users and teams that are only for internal members of your organization, as shown in Figure 15-3. (I cover how to do this in Chapter 3.)
FIGURE 15-3: Creating a separate team for guest users.
You also need to start thinking about who will take on the administrative roles. What I have seen with organizations of this size is that one or two people agree to take on the administrative duties for Office 365 and Teams. This includes things like adding new users, purchasing and managing licenses, and configuring admin settings that affect everyone in the organization.
Whoever signs up for the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription is automatically an administrator for the entire subscription, including Teams. A common scenario is that someone is tasked with signing up the organization and then finds out he or she is the administrator by default. I like to refer to this as the “accidental administrator.” The good news is that you can always assign others as an administrator, too.
I have noticed that most organizations of this size tend to spend most of their time in Teams and quickly collaborate and share files without leaving the Teams application. You will find many apps that you can install as tabs to help your organization be more productive. For example, you can add tabs for SharePoint and even Excel files. In addition, just like a one- or two-person organization, you will likely be interacting with guest users. I cover working with people outside your organization in Teams in Chapter 7.
Growing large (25 to 250 people)
In my experience, a company with 25 to 250 people is at the stage where it needs to scale its processes and start thinking about compliance and separation of duties. For example, the person responsible for the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licensing purchases might be someone in the purchasing department, and the person responsible for the Teams Admin Center might be someone in the IT department. In addition, a power user in one team might be responsible for the administration of that team, including the apps, and a power user in another team might be the admin for that team.
With this size of organization, the number of teams and channels can quickly become overwhelming, and it is time to start thinking about compliance procedures in order to keep track of all the teams and channels. It is likely that not everyone will be in every team, and the team and channel landscape will start to become complex and overwhelming.
I am often amazed at how many teams and channels even a medium-sized organization can achieve. By default, anyone can create a new team and channel. My recommendation is to focus on having a limited number of teams and then allow channels to grow and shrink as needed.
This is the time to come up with a strategy about public and private teams and team membership. For example, you might formalize private teams for specific areas of the organization such as legal, human resources, and accounting. You might want executive-level leadership to have a private place to communicate, and you might want to formalize some “all hands” teams that you can use for announcements and to keep every member of the organization on the same page. For teams you no longer want to maintain, you can archive them. Managing teams on a large scale, including archiving them, is something I cover in Chapter 16.
When a team is no longer active, you can archive it so that you maintain the channels and messages it contains yet keep it from cluttering up the app. Figure 15-4 shows the Manage Teams screen, which also shows your archived teams. I cover the Manage Teams screen further in Chapter 16.
FIGURE 15-4: The Manage Teams screen shows all your teams in a grid view.
This is also the time that individual users can start to think about tuning Teams out so that the noise they receive is relevant for them. Some of the features I find useful are notifications and hiding teams and channels. I cover this in more detail in Chapter 8.
As your organization reaches 250 people, you will be moving quickly to adopt features designed for the largest enterprise organizations that reach into the tens of thousands of members. These features include things like private clouds, hybrid scenarios, and dedicated connections to Microsoft. Chapter 16 covers some of the features designed for large enterprises.