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- Welcome to Microsoft Teams for IT Essentials,
our new series to help you implement Teams.
In the next few minutes, I'll break down
the core components of Teams, I'll walk you through
the main considerations for deployment and roll out,
and I'll share how you can have
the level of control you want to manage Teams.
Microsoft Teams is in half a million business
organizations today, including 91% of the Fortune 100.
There are good reasons for this.
As part of Microsoft 365,
beyond transforming the way people communicate
and work, Teams is built with you, the IT admin, in mind.
It has the Enterprise-class policies
and security that you need and expect,
as well as easy customization options to tailor
the Teams experience to your users and your organization.
In case you're new to Microsoft Teams, let me explain.
Teams is your hub for teamwork.
It brings together everything a team needs;
chat and threaded conversations, online meetings
with video conferencing, and content collaboration.
On top of that, you can use it across all your devices.
Meetings are also made simpler with Teams.
Besides online meetings,
Teams has an integrated calendar synced with Outlook,
so you'll never miss a meeting.
It supports HD video calls
with multiple participants,
desktop as well as mobile screen sharing,
whiteboard sharing, and of course, rich calling experiences,
where you can call other users in Teams
or Skype for Business, or take advantage
of optional PSTN calling integration.
Teams was built with accessibility
and inclusion in mind, spanning interface navigation,
automatic realtime closed captioning, chat translations,
high contrast display, immersive reader, and more.
So those are some of the highlights
of Microsoft Teams for users, but let's switch gears
to the IT admin benefits along with your options
to customize, configure, and manage the service.
One of the biggest benefits for IT admins
is secure collaboration.
We know shadow IT is a real challenge today.
While users may innocently sign up to services
as they explore ways to be more productive,
this presents a problem for you in IT because of the lack
of controls to protect the flow of business-critical data.
All activities in Teams are logged and auditable.
Teams has controls for eDiscovery to perform
content search and in-place holds.
In addition, data loss prevention policies prevent sensitive
information from being shared in the context of Teams.
Helping with the evolving needs of your users
while ensuring that you have full control
and manageability of information, shared both internally
and externally, is where Microsoft Teams comes in.
We've set out to create a solution
that both you and your users will love.
Now that you know its benefits,
let me walk you through the basics for implementing Teams.
To get the best experience, there are a few prerequisites.
First, Teams is a cloud-based service.
This means that users need to be connected to the Internet.
While we offer rich browser experiences,
Teams also has clients for Windows and Mac,
and Android and iOS mobile platforms.
Second, you'll need to have deployed
OneDrive, SharePoint Online,
and Exchange Online as part of Microsoft 365.
To understand why,
let me explain how this works architecturally.
In Microsoft Teams,
user folders and files are stored in OneDrive.
As you create a team, we automatically create
a dedicated Teams site in SharePoint
for managing the team's files and content.
And as I touched on earlier, calendaring, chat,
and contacts are integrated
with Exchange Online and Outlook.
One core benefit of these foundational services
is the rich information protection, security, compliance,
and audit controls of Microsoft 365, which you can explore
in our Security and Compliance Centers.
So while not a prerequisite, it's worth mentioning that
adding Microsoft Stream lights up the capability
to record meetings and get transcriptions
and close captioning.
That said, let's continue
with the last of our prerequisites.
Microsoft Teams integrates with your identity
and access management system using Azure Active Directory.
This allows you to control access
and take to advantage of multi-factor authentication
and intelligent conditional access.
In fact, it gives you unified identity
and access management, whether users sit inside
to outside of your organization's domain.
Next, to get an optimal experience with Teams,
your network must meet the network requirements
for Office 365, which you can learn more about
here at aka.ms/O365NetworkReqs.
Also, our network planner tool can help you calculate
network requirements for deploying Teams, Cloud Voice,
and a great audio-visual experience.
As a Microsoft Teams admin, you have a broad set
of management controls to govern services.
Before you deploy Teams, there are a few best practices
to help you get the control
and management you need from the get-go.
It's a good idea to clearly establish roles
and responsibilities for configuring and managing Teams.
This is a shared responsibility across IT, security
and compliance stakeholders, and users.
Here you'll want to think through
Admin and end-user privileges.
If you have a larger IT team, you may want to assign
different admin roles to perform specific tasks,
like Team Manager, Help Desk, or Compliance roles.
For users, you may want to govern
who has the ability to create teams.
Maybe that's an executive admin, managers, or everyone.
Next, based on your security
and compliance needs, organizational culture,
or type of industry you're in, you need to think through
the org-wide configuration settings
that you want to implement.
For example, based on regulatory or security needs,
for external access, you can specify the domains
of other organizations to either block
or allow communication between their users and yours.
Likewise, guest access to teams
and channels can be configured to provide
the right level of sharing and control.
For example, you can limit screen sharing
to protect sensitive information.
Additionally, you can configure which Cloud
file sharing services, in addition to OneDrive,
you want to allow, so that you can make them
available in the Teams Files tab.
Next, think about the core apps running in your business.
These can be line of business apps such as your expense tool
or HR systems or other external apps,
like ticketing or dev tools.
You can customize the Teams experience
and policies for your organization
and even specific teams by choosing which apps
and Cloud services can be integrated.
Beyond apps, you also need to think about
the style of communication in your company.
Teams offers a rich set of communication policies
so that you can configure the user experience in alignment
to your corporate standards and organizational culture.
For example, you can turn Giphys on or off,
or you can set up notifications
based on user profile, location,
and role, like turning on priority notifications
for healthcare professionals or retail managers.
We'll cover more on security
and compliance controls as part of our series.
Once you've thought through
and implemented your policies,
you can start planning your Teams rollout.
Your strategy here will depend on where you're coming from.
If you're making a fresh start with Teams,
you are already set to configure, deploy,
and roll out Teams.
If you are coming from Skype for Business Online or Server,
there are coexistence modes that we support.
And you have the option to configure hybrid connectivity
between your on-premises environment and Microsoft 365.
We will spend time on all these options
as we progress through the series
and you can also learn more at aka.ms/RollOutTeams.
Regardless of your starting point,
there are common best practices that you should consider.
As with any new service, it's always best to pilot first
within IT or early adopters to get familiar
with the user experience
and to collect feedback that will help inform
your configuration and deployment decisions.
If you don't want Teams enabled for all your users,
you can enable groups of users
in the Microsoft 365 Admin portal or use PowerShell.
Okay, not with Teams enabled, to kickstart adoption,
you want to start creating your first teams
to seed the experience for users.
Your org chart may be a good place to start
when defining which and how many teams to create.
You can automate membership to teams
so users know where to land.
Then, as people begin to work on projects
across organizational boundaries,
users can create their own teams.
For more convenience
and deeper integration within your existing
meetings infrastructure, you can integrate
your phone systems with Teams to enable PSTN calling
that allows you to use traditional phone numbers.
The most immersive experience can be achieved
with Microsoft Teams Rooms systems,
which help you to deploy smart teleconference spaces.
Lastly, do not leave user adoption strategies for the end.
Start as early as the pilot.
Speaking of which, let's move to user adoption,
which is key for the success of Teams.
With Teams deployed
and your early adopter group established,
another important aspect to drive adoption
is getting executive sponsorship
and consistent communication to your users,
clearly stating why we are changing
and what's new, better, and different for them.
Plan on combining this with online and in-person training.
Tips and resources for training
can be found at the link shown aka.ms/TeamsOnboarding.
So now, let's talk about management.
As adoption takes off, you can manage Teams with visibility
into usage across channel and chat messages, calls
and meetings, drill down into metrics by user,
and get more granular reports with Power BI.
This will help you measure the benefits of Teams,
identify potential champions,
and give you insights on where adoption
may require further action.
Additionally, to help you to manage Teams over time,
we give you lifecycle management controls.
For example, you can edit teams,
archive them, or delete them.
You can also modify the privacy setting
of an active team if needed.
So that was a quick overview on Microsoft Teams for IT
to help you plan, deploy, and roll out Teams
for your organization.
Don't forget to keep watching our series
at aka.ms/MicrosoftTeamsforIT, as we cover topics
such as general management, security
and compliance, migrating from Skype for Business to Teams,
user adoption, and more, with accompanying how-to guidance.
And if you haven't started yet, try Microsoft Teams today.
Thanks for watching.
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