published
September 19, 2019
Imagine for a moment you work as an IT project manager. Your boss just granted you the permission to deploy one of the most powerful workplace collaboration tools on the market.
The tool, MS Teams, is like the “Excalibur” of our day—a seemingly magical piece of software that can put order to chaos, and instill direction and security across the entire digital employee landscape.
As owner of MS Teams, you have the chance to make a real impact on the lives of your colleagues. This wonder tool will help your employees with productivity, communication, and inject a little modern “culture” into the workplace with trendy gifs, and emojis. More selfishly put—the success of a Teams rollout will elevate your professional profile, maybe even warrant a promotion or bonus from your boss.
It all seems like an easy slam dunk. There’s only one tiny wrinkle:
As popular as Teams is it’s really difficult to access timely, detailed information that can tell you exactly what you need to know in order to successfully deploy it.
Sadly, this is the exact and very real scenario many IT managers face.
Teams growing pains
Yes, Teams seems to be everywhere—just this summer Microsoft announced the tool surpassed Slack with more than 13M daily active users, and it’s reportedly used in 91 of the fortune 100 companies—but getting over that initial hump during your Teams rollout can be extremely tedious and costly.
“Never before has so much online “guidance” left so many still scratching their heads.
Like any good IT manager, you’ll probably go right to the source before deploying a new business services tool. The Microsoft support site does provide plenty of useful tips and guidelines about Teams, but you’ll quickly realize they can only get you so far.
For example, Microsoft details the network and bandwidth requirements you’ll need to sustain the type of traffic Teams demands, and there’s a helpful “discovery questionnaire” you can use to get a general sense of whether or not your organization is ready for a rollout. But IT managers don’t work in the world of questionnaires and “general sense”—they need hard data presented in an actionable format, reliable end-user metrics, and a technology platform that can help them proactively fix problems with remote actions and remediations.
If you look for other help online, you’ll find the same type of point-you-in-the-right-direction-but-leave-you-to-fend-for-yourself information.
The AvePoint blog, another useful source for all things digital, dishes out some good tips on what type of technical and governance questions you should ask before deployment, and they highlight which departments you should pick to “sell your users on Teams”. They recommend rolling out Teams first with employees from engineering, support, and sales due to each group’s presumed familiarity with the product and natural need for its services—again, helpful to know but nothing ground-breaking that speaks directly to your exact enterprise system and digital workplace environment.
The reality is you will inevitably have specific questions that require specific answers.
Luckily, that’s where we come in.
Nexthink answers specific questions with specific answers
With the Nexthink Digital Employee Experience solution we offer clients the ability to tackle any challenge—from IT questions regarding visibility into your devices, to business challenges like how to calculate your true ROI, and much, much more. Even better, we provide powerful IT solutions that work during any phase of your Teams rollout:
- Planning phase – before you start, determine whether your enterprise estate stands on firm ground or quick-sand. Identify potential trialists to pilot Teams based on real-time device metrics, uncover key communication circles, and isolate which collaboration tools end-users already use and how their activity could impact Teams.
- Migration phase – steer your migration with confidence and perspective. Answer questions like: How is Teams comparing to Skype and my other business services? Are we more productive and responsive as a support team now compared to pre-deployment? How is Teams impacting the company’s memory, disc space, CPU, and network strength?
- Post-migration phase – set your Teams project up for continuous improvement with the ability to benchmark your progress and effortlessly adopt new updates and features. Initiate remote actions and one-click remediations that proactively resolve problems for your employees experience a productive and enjoyable computing environment without any interference.
Online help docs and guidelines certainly have their place—but if your goal is to find an MS Teams solution that can answer your specific end-user computing questions—save yourself some time and get in touch with Nexthink.
