2020: The Importance of Collaboration Tools

Nowadays, everyone has been impacted by the pandemic situation that our country and the rest of the world is facing. Students taking classes form home, employees working from home, and even family meetings are happening through collaboration tools. This exceptional situation has forced different brands like Zoom, Skype, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft improve their resources to have the capacity to support a number of requests never seen before.

I would like to dive into Microsoft Teams. This Microsoft collaboration tool that is not new, in the past was knows as MCS (Microsoft Office Communicator Server) and was the first version that integrated the chat, call, conference, video call, and video conferences. We later had the first version of Lync, where we were able to have a better and robust infrastructure with different server roles like Back End for Databases, Persistent Chat, Mediation, Front End, Director, etc.

Nevertheless, the best improvement from the user standpoint was Skype For Business 2015, with a considerable change in the look and feel as it was the same client as the commercial version of Skype. Even though in the back end, Microsoft kept the same server roles, in my opinion, this was a huge progress.

THE OFFICE365 BOOM

There are several reasons why companies are migrating to Office 365 (also known as Microsoft 365). For example, a company that has Exchange 2010 and Lync 2010 on prem, need Office 365. When I say NEED it’s because they don’t have an option even if everything is working properly. Here’s a list of reasons:

Cost to maintain several servers on prem 

(more than 25 servers for exchange and more than 20 servers for Lync in an environment with two sites and high availability or fault tolerance in place).

End of support from Microsoft

This is true for Exchange 2010 (extended to October 13th, 2020) and Lync 2010 (extended to April 13th, 2021).

Problems with storage

The best practice for Exchange is to limit storage to 2GB per mailbox. If we have 20,000 employees and therefore, more than 23,000 mailboxes (for the simple reason that we have shared mailboxes, resource mailboxes, Public Folders, etc.) and if we have an HA solution implemented for data bases (DAG stands for Database Availability Group) that means we need to have 3 or 4 copies for each mailbox, allocated in different databases.  As a result, we need to have a considerable amount of TB in the storage. Just as reference, o365 provides 100GB for mailbox (depends of the license you have, I’m using E3 license as reference). 

Microsoft Teams is available only in o365. That means the company needs to migrate from Lync or Skype for Business, on prem, to the cloud. Once the users start using Teams to collaborate with other people, they have the following capabilities:

•  Access via web and client: you can have a conversation via chat or call with one or multiple people, join a meeting using either the web version or the client that has been installed or your device.

•  Conference: set up a call with more than one person.

•  Video-call: have a conversation with another user with video enabled.

•  Videoconference: have a conversation with multiple people, with video enabled.

•  Broadcast: very useful when the company needs to deliver a message for several people, for example, in all employees’ meetings when the organisation needs to inform yearly results or deliver corporate information.

•  Screen sharing: very important feature for training and troubleshooting. 

•  Remote control: in the IT world, this capability is very useful for technical support and Helpdesk.

•  File sharing: when you need to collaborate with more people, internal or external to your organisation.

•  Book meetings: when you schedule a meeting and all attenders will join using the same link.

•  Enterprise voice features: like assigning extensions, lines, sip trunks, response groups, agents, auto attendants, Call forward, and delegates.

At this point everything is the same as before, the most fascinating tools are the following:

•  Channels: dedicated sections where the users can keep conversations organised. 

•  Tabs: when you have a channel, you can pin content in different tabs, this can be Planner, OneNote documents, websites, Excel, Power Bi, the options are almost unlimited. 

•   Connectors: there are many ways you can bring information into a channel. This is possible thanks to connectors like Bing News, RSS, Forms, Azure DevOps, Google analytics, twitter, and Yammer.

•  Bots: applications that can help you improve your daily activities like SecretaryBot, Trello, Flow, Polly, Jira, and Calendar BOT. This application must be installed before using it in the channel.

•  Applications or services: options here are unlimited with services like SharePoint, OneNote, OneDrive, Planner, Stream or any other third-party solution you can use.

•  Storage: when you create a Teams, all files and information is saved in SharePoint and there is enough space to save all information. With that being said, there’s another advantage in having the uploaded files on SharePoint. All documents are in the same place, other members can modify the file and all changes will remain in the same file; that way your team can collaborate in an easier way.

•  Document versions: a possible concern could be what happens if someone removes information and now the document doesn’t have the desired data? well, now we can manage all document versions. 

•  Permissions: if you are using the cloud to store your documents, you can define who has permissions and what level of permissions they have, to just access the file or modify it. 

In a nutshell, the options to work with Microsoft Teams are almost unlimited because you can use either the o365 services or any other third-party application. From the administration standpoint, you also have access to reports that can help you admin, manage, and troubleshoot any issue your users may have.

Microsoft Teams is the most complete collaboration tool you can find in the market, even for education during COVID measures. If you want to get more information about Teams, visit the Microsoft Teams help center, coffee in the cloud website where you can find valuable videos on getting started with Teams and Twitter.com/MicrosoftTeams. Also visit teamsquiz.com to take an initial quiz for a deeper understanding about Teams.