Have you ever been frustrated at Microsoft Teams for not finding what you are looking for, or as an administrator, for the number of teams exploding completely out of control? If you have, you might want to continue reading.
Many organizations were forced to go full on remote, when covid-19 hit us in spring 2020. For most organizations, Microsoft Teams was the obvious choice for collaboration and communication. Some organizations were better prepared for the situation, some less so, and some were totally unprepared.
The issues referred to above are not due to Teams as a service, but the way it has been implemented and governed. Teams is a great tool but needs some adoption and governance work to be even more useful. Innofactor has created a new SaaS service, TeamsMate, to tackle these issues.
Collaboration Tools Are the Backbone of Hybrid Work in The New Normal
Now, after a year of remote work, we are used to it and are wondering what’s next. Looking at the numerous studies made on information workers’ preferences regarding location, most of us want to spend at least part of our working hours somewhere else than the office. The new normal seems to mean hybrid work for most organizations. This means that the role of Teams – or any other collaboration service for that matter – is as important as ever.
Issues that haunt most – if not all – Teams users seem to be quite universal. We’re often faced with a choice between using a team or a channel for a specific case – too often deciding to start a new team. The outcome of this is that the number of Teams is growing exponentially and ultimately, we experience issues in finding the information we’re searching for. So, what is the problem with endlessly growing number of teams?
Every passive and forgotten team is a potential dead-end when you search for information. Every orphaned team is an issue for the admins. Without shared practices and governance, the situation gets messier by the day. Wise thing to do would be to act ASAP, but the question is how.
Innofactor TeamsMate Helps You to Keep Microsoft Teams Relevant and Up to Date
The first step to successful online collaboration is to have a shared understanding on how we use Teams. The biggest impact of going to cloud is not technical but cultural. Cloud tools are shared and they require shared practices.
Nowadays, the question is not if people know how to use the tools. Instead, we need to figure out how to use them together. The next step is to make sure the technical environment is solid.
It is not enough to clean up your Teams once and be happy with it. In our experience, Teams needs constant grooming. It usually takes only months, after a thorough clean-up, for the situation to get out of hand again.
TeamsMate is a new SaaS service, which helps with most issues organizations face with Teams:
- It provides tools for enforcing naming policies for Team names.
- It helps to standardize team structures with configurable templates.
- It enforces default lifecycle features based on the type of the team and provides the option of automated team archiving.
- It highlights visibility of orphaned, passive and forgotten teams in your environment, helping you to do a good spring-cleaning for your Teams to always keeping it neat and tidy.
TeamsMate is designed with ease of use and security in mind. It is quick to implement and does not need a lot of training. The services are easily accessed from right within the app in the Teams left rail.
Interested in learning how your organization can benefit from TeamsMate? Book a demo with our expert.
