[Music] [Applause] all right hi everybody welcome to this week's friday fast 15. um i'm here today with holly peterson and we're talking about microsoft teams as we all know everybody has been working remotely these days and so a lot of organizations are looking to the various tools that they have at their disposal to enable a remote workforce so we have holly with us here today to talk a little bit more about teams um first off holly what are some misconceptions that you think a lot of people might have about teams that you think prevent organizations from taking full advantage of the platform i think the number one thing that i hear from people is that teams is just for chatting um because teams replace skype for business a lot of people kind of frame what they think about teams as to what they did in skype for business and a majority of people i use skype for business for chatting but teams is actually a brand new tool it does way more kind of expansive stuff into teamwork so it does everything um related to teamwork so chat meetings things like that um it also has this kind of brand new collaboration uh kind of tool set that allows groups of people whether they have a common project purpose or goal to work together um having conversations working on files together and all sorts of other tools that they they would want to integrate and create kind of a one-stop shop for their team and in fact i've seen it really make this moment in time a lot more manageable for a lot of our customers i've had multiple customers tell me you know as we're working on projects for deploying teams together they were like i can't imagine this moment without this tool like how would we have gotten this done um and i've seen a lot of teams be more seamless and successful um in transitioning to remote work uh using a tool like teens great um so you mentioned collaboration and file sharing so what's what would you say is the benefit to using teams over some of the other tools available like google docs or box or dropbox or things like that so i think that there's kind of two factors to that question that kind of like are equally important so the first one is you already own it if you own microsoft 365. so if you've bought into iphone office 365 microsoft 365 you own teams um so team there's no additional cost to using teams the second one would be around um security and privacy so one of the things i hear a lot from people is hey we have people using google docs or google or dropbox or google drive in our organization you know how do we get them to use teams so i usually say teams actually has a lot of the tool set and feature set that you were looking for when you sought out a tool like um google drive or dropbox so don't think of it as like a trade-off um you know from uh use usability so i would say there's kind of like two major factors and i would say it would put them as equal importance so one you already own it there's no additional licensing costs if you own microsoft 365 or bought into office 365 early on you already own teams so you don't have to spend any additional money making that a part of your office 365 license the other piece is that it's fully integrated with your office 365 suite so if you want to use word excel those things instead of using google docs or google sheets to do things like co-author documents together um you know again people go and gravitate towards dropbox or google drive and google docs to get the features and the enablement that we already have as part of your license tools in office 365. so people don't need to go and be sort of driven into the arms of a third party tool we have that for them here so make sure that you're advertising it as such um the other things that i really like about teams is again similar feature set again why people go to dropbox or google drive you can access it anywhere from any device teams lets you do that i love using the teams mobile app so there's all sorts of user enablement meanwhile it's secured the way you secure your office 365 tenant or your microsoft 365 tenant so if you have a password policy protecting your company data it's inherited by teams if you use a multi-factor authentication you're going to have to use multi-factor authentication to get into teams the third-party tools they kind of sit out there apart from whatever you're securing in microsoft 365. so you want to be uh you know make sure that people know you can do everything you can do with those tools plus it's secure it's keeping our company data safe and you are more than welcome to use the mobile app or access from the web so it's like it's like there's kind of a balance between ease of use but also keeping it secure keeping it you know so that not just any random person can can stumble upon that content right yeah exactly and i think um you know oftentimes we focus so much on locking down our environment um that again we kind of drive people into those tools but the best part about microsoft 365 and using teams is you kind of get the best of both worlds like we make it safe for people to use the way that they want to use it they can work the way that they need to work but it's secured using our policies and at the end of the day that data is ours it's it's our company's data it's not sitting out somewhere in some other third-party cloud tool that we don't have access to um it it's great so you get kind of yeah best of both worlds wonderful that's great um so the question i had um emails emails and meetings take up so much of my time during the day and i'm sure others are experiencing the same thing um might teams be this solution to helping cut down on that time spent you know trying to stay up on stay on top of emails or staying out of meetings and things like that is is this a solution so i oftentimes get um asked in trainings like when would i use outlook versus when would i use teams in fact a customer that wants a training solely about that topic and i've had to think a lot about those use cases um one thing i tell people a lot is that your muscle and habit for using outlook is a very strong you know we before teams all we had was outlook so we try and make it do all sorts of unnatural things that it just wasn't designed to do so think of a situation where you might be putting you know five people into the two line of an email and the the email itself is a question and you're thinking that these five people 10 people 17 people whole department are going to be responding you know rep hitting reply all these things quickly become these unwieldy things it's it's whenever we try to use outlook to have a real-time conversation that's when the headaches start and recently again pre-teams deployment i was recently on a customer email a chain that was 45 messages long there were more than 10 participants and i just needed a map and compass to like make my way through this thing and pretty soon we're having a meeting to talk about what's going you know to try and make sense of what we're discussing in the email so this is where teams can be really helpful when we want to have a real-time conversation with people and a linear conversation that's easy to follow we can do that it in a chat and we can also do it in a teams conversation so there's kind of two different type of you know vehicles of this conversation and i find that what teams does is it allows us to have those conversation with the kind of the stripped out clunkiness of of email so we can respond at the same time as one another without getting our you know wires crossed you know i think we've all heard people talk whenever we talk about we're getting our wires crossed i'm pretty sure that there's a reply all chain to blame for that phrase so that's really what i think it's all about is we can engage in problem solving in real time using chat and teams conversations outlook is bad at it it wasn't designed to do it and now microsoft has given us a tool that does it way better that makes so much sense so like um you know rather than having to then stop and have a meeting about the email that got out of hand you know that that meeting is unnecessary right you're all right on the same page you know right away in real time um but but let's talk about hosting meetings and teams for a minute so that's possible right yes absolutely so um so teams again another kind of beauty part of teams the a good part is that teams and outlook although they kind of are opposing forces right for communication they really do integrate and talk with one another so your outlook calendar has a an integration into creating uh teams meetings so you could create a and host a teams meeting right from outlook so you don't have to learn any new tricks like if you can make a meeting in outlook you can make a teams meeting and outlook um and in teams on the other side you can actually see everything that's on your outlook calendar in teams but your team's calendar is really focused on what teams meetings do you have and you can join them as we are right now uh you sent me an outlook invite we join this meeting in teams and it works really really well uh i think of teams meetings and calls are that moment where hey this is easier than typing a conversation when we need to get together um we can have these meetings and frankly i've seen again the current environment that we are in where many many people are working remote um teams meetings are that lifeline of being able to hear other people's voices and interact with your co-workers who i'm sure a lot of people miss um that i just think it's you know we're all having a lot of fun doing teams meetings and in fact we're all experimenting with now the new custom backgrounds feature um and all sorts of fun stuff so um teams meetings are not only you know technically adept and ready for you but they're fun and so i it's definitely still a tool that you're going to want to use yeah are there any other tips that you have for using teams to enable a remote workforce be ready to coach each other out of old habits um i said and i've said it i'll always say it your outlook muscle is so strong i even catch myself opening up a new email and start filling it out and realizing oh my gosh i'm trying to kick off a reply all tornado and i should take that over into teams and not do this via outlook that's probably when i still catch myself doing it and i train people to use teams it is because our outlook habits are pretty deep so coach yourself coach others um a good rule of thumb you know for those that are committed to using teams try and watch how many reply all cycles you're getting through if an email chain goes on longer than three reply alls be be the change you want to see in the world say time out let's go let's try and take this up in a chat in teams um oftentimes you're going to arrive at whatever answer or solve the problem you're trying to solve a much faster via chat or a team's conversation and then last you know teams like any tool that's part of microsoft 365 changes pretty regularly there's new features being added all the time stuff that people are really hungry for so make sure in your organization that people have an awareness of what's changing and when so that you can communicate those changes to one another um some of us will figure out on our own that certain things are there but for things that people have been really wanting like the custom backgrounds in teams meetings like be the person who gets to give the good news to your organization and also make sure that you have training available support help available oftentimes when we're deploying teams or rolling out teams it's new for everyone in the company including it support so make sure that your it support team gets the attention they need that they have the knowledge that they need to support everyone so kind of let them be a little ahead of the curve that can really make a difference and make sure that everyone in your organization is ready to adopt and use teams that that's great i mean it sounds like you know all these all these features sound so great and it's really just it comes down to a shift in workflow right it just it's a slight change in in in an individual's workflow how they get things done throughout the day right um which is the biggest challenge but everything everything else on paper sounds like you know you can get a lot done using teams so um i mean crossfuse is the workflow company so hopefully you know we have a few people on the staff here that can talk a little bit about that too so um yeah i mean it it thank you so much holly this has been so great um i'm sure there's a lot of people that will have a lot more questions about this and how we can better um leverage teams within their organization so um for all for everybody watching um if that's you don't hesitate to reach out um you can always get us at let's talk crossfuse.com um and make sure to follow us for next week's friday fest 15. all right thanks caitlin bye [Music]