Ode to Microsoft Teams — a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products.
INTRO
For anybody leading teams or projects widespread adoption of Microsoft Teams with 2x user base jump caused by the corona virus is godspeed. The app that has been created during an internal hackathon at Microsoft, does deliver to original idea to «get the team much more close-knit».
EVERYBODY’S 💊 SPOC
Teams comes bundled with Microsoft 365 suite. This means no invitations, onboarding, etc. Everybody is on instantlhy and one can create project team with few clicks. It’s not a dedicated tool mostly used by the project / team manager, where he/she should be the master of the application, yet everbody else can ignore it. It is not cumbersome anymore to assign the person and see if he/she has access instantly. In addition one can add people from the outside of the organization — which is an icing on the topping. Thus you have all your team in a single digital place — which can explain speedy adoption of Teams during this covid remote time. Also there is single tool for communicating with your team mates: no different tools in different departments. It is one single MS Teams instance with lots of teams / projects in the instance. What you need now either choose SEARCH for team or add one.
BETTER THAN 📧
These days I still in the corporate world emails is the key ingredient of any kind of communication. Project email communication has great variety of applications: status messages, 1–1 communication, meeting minutes, decisions, file attachments, meeting invites, notifications etc. There is so much noise in the single mailbox and therefore it is not suprising that everybody is talking about this space — eg. ref. Y combinator founder — email is broken ref. This changes with MS Teams if you want running MS Teams. You can user your mailbox as notifiction for teams, but rest can move to teams. So this is one tool to rule them all: communication, files, organizational structure, wiki and all other apps that you want add to your project tab.
Email should be taking most of the place: Outlook, Gmail etc.
NOT ONLY FOR ONLINE MEETINGS
If you look at Microsoft 365 as a service suite — Teams stands as part of «teamwork bubble» under *online meetings* block. https://www.data3.com/microsoft/microsoft-365/ My bet that Teams is going to be Teamwork bubble itself — most of you should be experiencing this. There is more and more MS suite native apps and 3rd party apps available. Integration is not the best, but it is going in that direction. The next phase could be MS Teams as OS as a service without no need for any other applications on your machine. Chromebook for business — sorry Google Developers, it could be MS is after your business and Slack API was just motivation & inspiration stop.
WORKS (ALMOST) 💯 WITH ALL PM APPs
