Justin Lentz, I'm a Senior Manager of Operations for CenturyLink.
Dmitry Gancho, I'm now a Solution Architect, CenturyLink. [Off camera] Correct me if I'm wrong but you both were
on Slack before Teams right and then CenturyLink made this effort to move
your organization from Slack to Teams. What was that journey like? Transparent - what was it like? It sucked. It was
something that had been coming through the pipes for quite a long time. We
were a small organization out of the greater company and Slack was a pretty
sizable investment for a smaller organization so it was always high on the
list of things to cut and we fought it, and fought it, and fought it because we based
our entire incident management on a small team, able to do a lot, and that was,
Slack allowed us to do that. We were like, we cannot change and move from Slack to anything
else, Teams or otherwise, if we can't have this
capability because you will kneecap us and we'll just be dead in the water and
so we started using Teams and Slack side-by-side and, woof, they're different user
experiences for sure. [Off camera] Any thoughts you'd want to add there Dmitry,? I think that I was actually excited about that movement
when I first kind of heard of it. [Off camera] So you were excited about the move from Slack to Teams? From Slack to Teams, yeah.Oh yes finally, let's go!
The other thing is I liked integration. So I like that teams is part of broader set
of Microsoft products so they can talk to each other they can you know use the
same way identities, the same concepts and same security model for example.
This sort of things really excited me. [Off camera] Appreciate your partnership. And having someone
like to Dmitry, as really the main developer who's excited, really does help
move things smoothly. The challenge was to me specifically it was to you know not to lose anything in
user experience and that was a huge challenge. So once I figure out how to
sort of present or make the user experience as close as possible to the
convenience they had in Slack, then the thing went smooth. But that was the first
difficult step and then we started to figure out what are the other options
that didn't exist in Slack, and there are plenty of them so we leverage to use
some of those availabilities and, for example, the web pages, the tabs and this kind of stuff.
But on the other side of the coin is that how he says the real estate is sort
of lost a lot of space lost on the screen. So I cannot really, until now, I cannot
present the information you know precise, compact, and seeable in one
glance. It's a challenge. Once we got all the access figured out, because we're
not tenant admins, but once we got all that sorted out, we were able to do some
development and real quick found stuff that was a feature add that
Teams had that Slack didn't and once that was able to be seen throughout the
team, they adopted it pretty quickly. [Off camera] The capability you were mentioning in Slack
before you moved that you were concerned about having when you move over, was that anything in
particular? It's a lot of information gathering through a lot of different
sources. Pulling from tickets, pulling from the customer portal, pulling from
the back-end infrastructure, VPNs, you know just all sorts of things just
getting it centrally located in one spot in the easy read format it's a help
to expedite troubleshooting. Without that we wouldn't be able to
handle the load that we have. [Off camera] And that was all for incident response in this case? Yeah.
[Off camera] And so when you did make that move to Teams and you noticed
those capabilities that you found on there that you didn't have before anything that pops to mind there?
A real quick and easy one was Forms. Because one of the main complaints
in Slack you know if somebody was submitting a
form they'd answer a couple questions and then they might get a phone call or
chat or get distracted. They come back and it's timed out. So all that information is gone.
But with the form, it all just right there. It's static so you can come and go as you
please and then hit submit and you're done. So that was a quick and easy win to show that it
wasn't gonna be all bad. When we were in Slack, every incident that was, every
qualifying incident or urgent or whatever you want to say, got its own channel, and then it's all archivable
and it was just very easy to pull people in that are needed and
whatnot and only the people that need to be there are there. It's nice,
easy. That type of experience doesn't really exist in Teams but Dmitry figured
out how to capture all of the conversation history in the team channel
and move it to SharePoint. So it's static and there forever so we can
then delete the channel and not lose any information. When incident is closed, we need
to save the data for future references and for searches if necessary and even legal
reasons so whatever can happen and that was a challenge in Teams that
was not a challenge in Slack. But in Teams, channel gets deleted and it I
think it stays archived for 30 days and then everything is gone. [Off camera] At a team level, not a channel level? Right. So the
workaround this was to save the information to the underlying
SharePoint site, SharePoint folder which stays for this channel I believe forever
and that's where we save, including the conversation history, the files that were
used, or the screenshots that were attached those sort of things. But there
are challenges on the way and one of them is that pulling the conversation
history is still beta, which is not supposed to be used in production. But
there is no other way at this moment right so that's the challenge but the
web form itself that was built to for Incident Commander to finally do the
paperwork and file all the summaries and start-end time, impact time,
who was impacted, and all those kind of things it was built integrated into
Teams and that is a very helpful solution compared to what we had in
Slack. So there is no extra web server, no
movement of data between channel and the website. So it's extremely helpful to
have that integration. The website, the channel, the SharePoint site in one place
Skynet is the name of the bot that we utilized and just you initialize it
and you say what the type of incident it is but then it goes and it creates the
ticket, and it creates the channel. [Off camera] So a channel within an existing team? Yeah,
and it will page out the appropriate parties, and then we
created another bot, or this function within Skynet, that will then
utilize our paging service to page out any other teams or individuals as
necessary. But then once the incident is done, there are two stages. First is
Resolve, which changes the title of the channel to say "resolved" at the end so
that if somebody comes in at a glance they can see that you don't need to
worry about that one and then it also creates the tab to do the instant
report, and then you close and it totally gets rid of the channel. [Off camera] When you say close, are you just
deleting the channel essentially but it's still that's awesome.