What is our primary use case?
Microsoft Teams is used, in our case, to collaborate with all internal employees, to work on offering some proposals, and to work together online on files in Word and Excel. We largely use it to collaborate online and to have video meetings with customers.
We can integrate SharePoint sites with other people. We have libraries that are available within Teams so that people can sync those libraries to their local drives and therefore will have the most up to date information and documents at their disposal.
What is most valuable?
The integration of online jobs and documents is one of the most valuable aspects of the solution. The ability to integrate tasks and to assign tasks to certain people is great.
What needs improvement?
I'm really waiting for the release of Lists to be included. Lists is a new feature that will probably come into Teams in August. It will be a way of using some sort of database to enter interlinked lists.
I don't like the online version of Word and Excel. It skews the layout. It is no longer representative of the layout that you actually have in a document. You always have to open it in the desktop application to get an accurate representation of how the document will look.
If you open a document in Teams, it opens online first. If you have, for instance, an entire image on the front page, that image is descaled to the right and to the bottom. So you have a lot of white space on the page, while in reality, it's pretty nicely aligned. You basically have a borderless page. That's one of the main things that they can improve on. If they had a workaround where you can open it in the desktop apps first, it would be better.
The solution needs to adjust the number of protected channels within a team.
The solution should maybe include breakout rooms within a team meeting. For example, let's say you are with 10 people, within one meeting space. You can have three accounts in separate smaller "meeting rooms" with just two or three people accessing them and still be within the same larger meeting environment. Let's say if you have a team where you have some technical members, some solution architects, a bid manager, a capture manager, an account manager, etc., you should be able to break up a meeting into multiple smaller sessions on certain topics, and yet still stay within the same meeting space.
They should include a visual application also within Teams, so drawings that are made can attach to that space within the proposal with the ability to add Word or Excel files, as well as tasks, etc.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using the solution for two years now. That's well before everyone started using conferencing systems during COVID-19.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's a stable solution. We haven't had any hiccups. Its been working flawlessly for the two years that I'm using it now.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is easy to scale, however, you need to take into account best practices so that you don't lose oversight on the number of teams that you have.
There are other things that can be improved of in terms of scaling. For the moment, you can have approximately 5,000+ different teams within your Office 365 license. In each team, you can have multiple channels. The number of channels with limited access rights is limited to 256 or 250. If you create a channel where you want to find all your different projects and you have more than 250 customers within one team, you run into issues. Then you have to create separate teams for each customer. In those teams, you have various possibilities on channels. We started using a team, for instance, for customer projects. However, in customer projects, you are limited. It's only on about 25 channels that you can give access rights to certain people. If you are working on the project with company X together for a customer, you don't want them to see another project for another customer with a competing solution. That's the tricky part.
That was a limitation that we encountered with scaling. We changed the approach from having a team customer project to creating teams for each customer where we have projects.
Currently, in our organization, we have 250 employees using Teams. We use it quite extensively every day.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't really reached out to technical support. If we need support, we first reach out to our IT department and they will figure it out on our behalf, or contact Microsoft directly. In my experience, until now, with Office 365, I haven't had any issues. I'm satisfied with the product but I can't speak to any specific experience related to customer service.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We use a bunch of solutions at any given time. We have Cisco Webex, for example. We also have the Mitel My Call app and for some of our customers, we also need to use Zoom and BlueJeans. So we have quite a few solutions that are active.
If you look at just the feature of video conferencing and you look at Zoom and BlueJeans and Microsoft Teams, they're all pretty much alike. It's mainly the integration of everything document-wise and the consistency that I really liked within Microsoft Teams.
Out of all of the other solutions, BlueJeans is the one that I found the least reliable. We had quite a few hiccups where we eventually fell back to Cisco WebEx for video conferencing instead of the BlueJeans solution.
Then we have Zoom, which I have less experience with. It's used by a few vendors with whom we collaborate from time to time. They use Zoom predominantly, so when we conference with them, it's largely through that.
In terms of Cisco WebEx, the thing that I don't like is that if someone invites you for a meeting and you connect to the meeting early, you don't get notified when the meeting actually starts, so you constantly have to reload until the meeting organizer starts the meeting and accepts you. For instance, last week, I went into a Cisco WebEx meeting. I connected two minutes before the actual time that the meeting should have started. I opened the WebEx application and the meeting didn't start. 10 minutes later, I reloaded the application and reconnected to the session and they were already actively meeting. The application didn't notify me when the meeting actually started. That's a big drawback.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is installed by our IT department. In the beginning, we had some issues with assigning rights. Not everybody was able to create a team or to invite people into a team or to share files. However, now they have changed a few things around. There are quite a few people now that can create teams, add members, etc., and you can add external members and there are a few new policies internally about best practices.
I was one of the first parties to implement a solution like Teams. Our company bought a few companies and every company was using different tools as their main resource. The one thing that they all had in common was Microsoft Office 365, and yet they didn't use Teams at that time. I was one of the people asking our organization to implement Teams because my position requires me to have to collaborate with people from all of the different companies that our company bought.
The deployment was done in less than a week. That was due largely due to the availability of our IT staff. Once they began doing the implementation, however, it was done within a few hours. It was activated, rights were assigned, and people with rights could begin working and downloading the team's application on smart devices, on their computers almost right away.
It's as easy as using Skype for a private person. You just download the application and you can start.
What other advice do I have?
I believe we've been using the latest versions of the solution. We use whichever version is pushed out with Office 365.
I would recommend the product. It works with everything. I have an iPad Pro, I have an iPhone, I have my computer. It's installed on all three devices. It works flawlessly.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten, simply because there are a few things the solution still needs to improve upon.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.