Hi there

If you’re thinking of Deploying Microsoft Teams under Office 365 subscription or M365 you are on the right place. I’m covering a few field tips so you can your teams project rolled out successful. This guide is mostly for Quick Deployment as per all requests I’ve seen on the past months.

Due to the COVID-19 moment Microsoft Teams has been playing an important role on having companies globally ready to work from home or remote for those who are still roaming. Therefore, there are some caveats to plan, pilot, deploy and roll out Microsoft Teams for Small, Medium or Large companies. However, regardless of the company size and what’s bringing those companies to cloud-based technologies such as Office 365 and its Applications (Exchange, Teams, SharePoint Online, Stream, Overdrive for Business, etc.), Azure or any other non-Microsoft related platform the following should be considered: Security, End-user experience and a clear Project Scope.

A clear Project Scope will drive your entire project as long as your organization know what is going to be enabled however, if that’s not the case you should consider to demonstrate following Microsoft Teams key features beforehand.

  • Chat & collaboration
  • Teams and channels
  • Meetings and Live events
  • Phone capabilities and External access (Federation and Guest access)

For Security, you should ask the key people what features and applications will be enabled by default and for how many users and groups will be targeted during the Pilot and on Production. Understanding which users or groups will have access to which application within Microsoft Teams will save you time and effort on configuring meeting policies, live events policies and teams and channels creation access. Additionally, keep in mind the Microsoft Teams relies on Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for business components as a collaboration tool with full experience and you might need to consider making changes on how your organization access its data and shares it externally. You can also take the advantage of Azure AD and AIP – Azure Information Protection to increase your organization security aligning best practices with your business requirements.

Moreover, for end-user perspective have a clear understanding about what the organization is looking for based on the amount of users dividing them by groups if needed for policies assignments (application setup policies, meeting policies, teams policies and live events policies). User will talk to each other and will ask themselves why they’re distributed in different groups based on their Microsoft Teams application experience; what they can see that’s enabled by default on Flat client, Teams web app or Mobile clients. Therefore, consider the Pilot as the most important phase after you have all prerequisites well defined and understood by each key person assigned to your Teams Project Deployment.

In addition, during the Pilot have in mind that changes will take longer to replicate at Microsoft side as informed by them on their Product Channels and at Office 365 Service Health portal. I’ve experience 24 to 48 hours to replicate users’ policy changes as well as for new features and settings there were implemented ad hoc. Again, don’t think that changes applied in the morning are going to take effect right away or in a couple hours that’s not what I’ve seen on field.

Least but not the last, have a Pilot Test Plan documented with all features to be tested by each user group covering the entire user experience and the expected result so you can track for issues or even any misunderstanding from the IT staff or affected users when they have the chance to evaluate Microsoft Teams. Then, make sure that after you finish the solution design and you’re ready to go to the pilot to check the following items:

  • User’s license per feature you might need to enable
  • User’s license assignment process
  • User’s life-cycle (creation, sync, block, deletion and recovery)
  •  Guide the client through the Teams Demo

Finally, consider and be prepared for issues on Microsoft Teams platform on the vendor side. Yes, Microsoft has being hammed on the past weeks by the load on their cloud-based applications as well as every IT service provider worldwide since companies were forced to switch over their personal to work from home. I got a couple tickets with Microsoft where the best way to fix was by waiting on their side to have everything working fine once all changes made at Microsoft Admin Portals were having issues during Microsoft infrastructure updates and upgrades implemented.

References

What is Microsoft Teams?
Where should I start?
Support for remote workers
Upgrade to Teams

Appendixes

Office 365 Portal

Office 365 Admin Portal

Microsoft Teams Admin Portal

Service Health

Thanks,

Thiago Beier
TwitterLinkedInFacebookRSS