microsoft teams: the ultimate reseller’s guide to … · tasks, including co-creating content and...

Microsoft teams: THE ULTIMATE

RESELLER’S GUIDE TO

FEATURES & BENEFITS

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Table of contents3 - Basic Overview: What is Microsoft Teams?

4 - Primary Features for Microsoft Teams

6 - End-User Benefits

8 - Teams for Specific Roles


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Teams is a chat-centered workspace that is integrated within Office 365. It is Microsoft’s answer to the fast-growing collaboration platform Slack; giving users instant access to the tools they need for successful, collaborative teamwork.

If this application sounds a little like Skype for Business, or Lync, it’s because Teams is replacing Skype for Business. Teams is designed to get work done faster and more collaboratively. You can share updates and give feedback, reply to comments, make quick decisions and stay in the loop with team activities. You can also coordinate on projects and tasks, including co-creating content and deliverables.

As a part of Office 365, Teams comes with Azure Active Directory, SharePoint, OneNote, Office 365 Groups, and many more, already built-in applications. This allows your customers to maximize their Office 365 investments, while providing a simple and secure user experience.

As you know, Office 365 has strong commitments regarding security, compliance, privacy and transparency. Teams was specifically built using these same principles to deliver an enterprise-grade platform.

Basic Overview: What is Microsoft Teams?


Primary Features of

Microsoft TeamsMicrosoft Teams offers a rich dedicated hub for all team activity. A few of the things it includes are: team and private conversations, spontaneous meetings and calls, content sharing, and real-time collaboration. It brings every Office 365 collaboration tool into an effective, fast, and friendly team workspace.


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At the center of every great team is communication. Being able to chat easily with colleagues is one of the primary benefits of this tool. Microsoft Teams also brings together files from your SharePoint team site, notes from OneNote, and even your Exchange calendar. As Teams is integrated with Skype for Business, you can turn a conversation into a video call with the click of a button, via instant messaging.

Chat Section

Team members can schedule meetings straight from Microsoft Teams. By clicking the Meetings tab, they can view all their meetings across Exchange, Skype for Business, and Teams all in one place. For any channel, employees can schedule a meeting to sync with their team directly from Microsoft Teams. Let’s say the user has a scheduled meeting that is just about to start. In the meetings section, they can very easily tell which meetings are Microsoft Teams enabled. Clicking Join allows them to immediately enter the call with other invited attendees.

Meetings Section

Users can keep focused and productive with Microsoft Teams. They can stay up-to-date with their team’s latest activity, wherever they are. Alerts and mentions help them to stay on top of what’s happening within their team. They can quickly scan breaking news and notifications in the Activity area. When they find a relevant alert, users can click to view the conversation.

Activity Section

Members can easily add a number of useful services, through tabs and connectors. Files and Notes come built in for every channel. However, they can also add tabs for specific Office documents, Power BI reports, and many others. When a user wants to continue collaborating on a file they shared with a colleague, they can pin it to a tab at the top of the channel. From here, the team can easily access the file and review the most current version. In addition to powerful services like Power BI, Microsoft Teams is integrated with a wide selection of project management apps, social feeds, and data visualization tools via Connectors. Each team member can use Connectors to quickly add apps to Microsoft Teams.

Tabs

Each Microsoft Teams environment has channels to organize different types of activities, content, and topics. Within a channel, team members can quickly use visual cues to pick up where they left off. New, important, or direct messages are all clearly highlighted in the conversation stream.

Teams Section


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End-User

BenefitsNowadays, businesses often have people working remotely from their main office. As a team expands, communications can become increasingly cluttered and hard to keep track of. In this new ecosystem, it’s likely your organizations are struggling to communicate clearly.

Let’s look at the key features Microsoft Teams offers that are game changers for your end users.


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Team Communications all in one PlaceAs mentioned above, one of the main pain points for many teams is keeping track of the varied ways in which they’re communicating. It can quickly becomes overwhelming to keep track of email threads a mile deep, Skype conversations, text messages, just to name a few.

With Microsoft Teams, communication happens all in one place, and can be segmented by creating channels for various topics.

It also ensures they all know what content is being put out publicly and gives them an easy route for promoting and sharing these posts across individual social networks.

Secure for Every VerticalSecurity is another area in which Microsoft Teams stands above the competition. It ensures your organizations peace of mind by providing cutting-edge security and compliance capabilities. Since it is built on the Office 365 enterprise-grade cloud, it delivers the advanced security and compliance capabilities expected by your customers. Data is encrypted while in transit, and at rest.

Microsoft Teams also meets compliance standards including ISO 27001, HIPAA. SOC 2 and the EU Model Clauses. It is also a part of Microsoft’s global network of data centers, which has a transparent operational model.

Accessible from AnywhereTeams also has mobile apps. When team members work from home, they will be able to keep up with their work communications as they run errands during the day. Plus, the layout and functionalities are great.

All Content is Searchable from One Search BoxYou’ve probably searched your email inbox before to find that ONE piece of information you needed, buried deep within a thread.

Everyone has been there and it’s no easy task. Teams makes it dead simple to find that link that someone posted three weeks ago, that you just want to go and look at. Not only is the search super fast and friendly, you can apply filters to make your searches as efficient as possible.

Imagine this scenario: You remember that a few weeks ago you were chatting with a colleague and he posted a link to a really great resource that would help you complete a certain task. But you can’t quite remember the link or name of the website. By applying the different search filter options, you can narrow your search to conversations with that colleague or just in a certain channel.

Integration with Other ServicesYou can integrate Microsoft Teams with some of the web services your customers use every day. Apps like Asana, Trello, Hootsuite, YouTube and Survey Monkey are just some of the third-party solutions integrated as “connectors” in Microsoft Teams.

But the real strength of Teams lies in its integration with Office 365. You can easily embed and collaborate over Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote and other Office files. Skype calling is built in, so your colleagues can easily arrange voice or video conferences.

Also, when Skype for Business is phased out, calling features will be added to Teams such as inbound and outbound calls to PSTN numbers, hold, call transfer, and voicemails. Microsoft has also done a great job at making Teams compatible with Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the web.


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Teams for

Specific Roles Driving adoption through user scenarios is always a good way to get customers onside. Let’s go through scenarios for two different departments: Engineering and Finance.


When quality assurance testers identify issues, engineering teams need to quickly discuss technical details with team members and coordinate their resolution efforts.

The workspace in Microsoft Teams allows team members to move quickly from conversations to content and tasks. Teams can help resolve bugs and issues more efficiently by providing context, continuity, and transparency to the entire team.

Here’s an example of how team activities can be organized as they track issues and manage the whole team: They can create an Issue Resolution team, or channel, where team members can ask each other questions and respond easily when they are online.

The Meet Now feature allows them to speak via video chat. These features often reduce the need for in-person meetings, allowing faster and more productive communication – particularly for teams with members who work remotely.

They can also connect to external content, such as a bug-tracking system. This means that all relevant content is readily available, regardless of whether its source is an internal or external application or service.

Here are some channels engineering teams might want to have:

Sprint Planning & Retrospectives Channel This channel can be used for team activities associated with planning and executing tasks associated with a specific project. They can also add tabs that link directly to specific files. This may be helpful for files that will be frequently used by the team.

Work Items Channel This channel can be used to notify team members, using the Visual Studio Team Services connector. For example, when there is a change to a work item, a build is completed, or a release is scheduled.

Project Management Channel This channel can be used to collaborate on the overall development of project tasks and progress. They can add relevant documents under the file section, such as:

• Project schedule (via a connector tab, for example, to Microsoft Project)

• Release notes

• Project charter

• Business and technical requirements

• Statements of Work

Engineering teams:

Fixing issues


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Budget planning and management require extensive collaboration within and across departments throughout an organization. Both of these activities involve communication, task management, coordination, and collaboration between department managers and the finance department. Some typical team-based activities associated with budget planning and management might include:

Marketing & Sales Forecast Channel The team responsible for preparing marketing and sales forecasts must effectively communicate with a wide range of people; from company executives, to research and development, product launch, and production department managers. Teams helps to provide context and transparency for those involved at every level of a task.

Capital & Operating Expenditures Channel The CAPEX budgets for individual departments require extensive planning to ensure accurate financing for capital projects.

The OPEX budgets for individual departments need close coordination among team members and across departments. It is necessary to ensure the information is accurate, correct, and complete

Budget Reporting Channel Department managers must provide various budget performance reports to the finance department. Teams can be used to get information from various individuals within the department and throughout the organization.

Finance Teams:

Budgeting


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About SherWebSherWeb has nearly two decades of experience simplifying the cloud for MSPs. Today, more than 5,000 partners worldwide rely on our expertise in high-volume provisioning, migration and support. SherWeb is an Indirect CSP partner in Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. This allows SherWeb to help partners go to market faster with Office 365. You own the customer relationship, control the pricing and billing and set your own margins.

MICROSOFT TEAMS:THE ULTIMATE RESELLER’S GUIDE TO FEATURES & BENEFITS is published by SherWeb Inc. Content from this publication may only be reprinted with written permission and when credit is given to SherWeb.

The information in this document is based on best available resources at the time of its publication. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.

All other brand, company, and product names are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks that are the sole property of their respective owners.

© 2018, SherWeb Inc.


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