OK so first things first. The saying on dead fishes. People tend to see the water and stream as the mainstream. The struggling fish are working hard to go against it and only the dead ones goes along without a fight. The thing is… all the fish in the stream is going the same direction. The mainstream should therefor be considered the upstream that most of the fishes are travelling. Going the other way, downstream, is actually going against the stream in this case and not the other way around. Right?
Perhaps I’m overthinking this but I feel like Teams fits in rather fine in here. Just because everyone else is working towards something doesn’t mean you should to. I feel like this is not one of those cases. With teams, follow the group and struggle up the stream. It’s worth it!

There are a number of different modes in moving from Skype to Teams and I have no intention of going into any details on such technical stuff in this blog post. Instead I would like to highlight some of the things you could use to convince your end users in Teams superiority over Skype for Business.

Gather everything in one place

This is really one of the key aspects of using Microsoft Teams. You gather everything in one place, regardless if we’re talking about files, conversations, chats or tabs.
It’s much easier for your users to accept a new application if it does more than just replace another 1-1. “What?! Another application? But it does the same as the one I already have…”. In this case, you get much more than just the 1-1 service.

Improved functionality

As we entered summertime of 2018, Microsoft announced “Full feature functionality” for Microsoft Teams. That meant that Teams was now able to preform everything that Skype for Business could do (with some specific exceptions to calling).

Since then, Teams has gotten A LOT of new features that Skype doesn’t have. Some of my favorites:

• Share your screen in your iPhone in a meeting
• You get 2 pointers when giving control
• When sharing an application, you don’t get that ugly black area when moving another window on top of the one you’re sharing

Persistent chat

This might seem like just a small thing and honestly something you should be expecting in 2019. Even still, this is not standard in Skype for Business and thus it makes it to my little list here. By being able to look back in the history of conversations I would argue that time can be saved and that drives real value.

Teams is a great enabler

I remember to days of Office 365 Groups. It was awesome to demo! No one understood how things where connected and it didn’t really get a good grip in organizations.

I’ve always worked with Power BI reporting. People tend to love it but let’s face it. Distribution isn’t really that simple. It takes some time to the hang of it for new customers.

Forms! A great service but if you want to use the same form as a production system, you need to onboard new users to “the link”.

Teams saves the day! PowerApps, Forms, Power BI Reports and much more is enabled through the use of teams. It’s so much easier to distribute things in a place where people already are. Why drag people away from where they want to be? Consider instead to fill your Teams environment and make sure you are where your users wants to be.

Involve the first line workers in the digital environment

You know how we did it in “the good old days”. We wanted to involve our first line workers in our digital environment. We want to be able to reach out. The solution: give them a email address.

For real?

We’ve given email addresses to countless people with absolutely no plan to further involve them or provide valuable information to them that way.

I would argue that Teams solves this. By including the first line workers in a Team and use transparent and open conversations you suddenly find yourself having valuable information in a place it can be found. Your first line workers are able to get involved since they now are aware of the topics being discussed and they’re not just sent an email ones every other week to be informed about some new policy from the company.

This was some gathered thoughts on Teams. I’ll continue to share my tips and ideas here in the blog but please feel free to reach out if you want to discuss Teams, adoption or anything else regarding the Microsoft Cloud Services!

Cheers!