Thank you for joining us for another episode of Teams Superheroes. I am stoked
about today's session. I'll let my esteemed guest here introduce himself if you
would. Hey, I'm Phecda. I'm a program manager on Microsoft Teams and I
specifically focus on the Team s in channels area on how we can get our team
owners to be successful at creating good teams. So dude, I spend a lot of time
talking to customers about what you guys are doing I think it's one of the
coolest things that we have on Teams. Can you maybe fill in those watching what
you're working on right now. Yeah so I mean at a high-level kind of my goal is
to look at all the features set and all the capabilities that Teams has in
helping team owners team leaders set up successful digital collaboration spaces.
That's you know really the end goal and part of that you know manifests
itself in some of the work that we're doing and the Team creation experience,
all the way to some of the more exciting things I think we're gonna be talking
about more today is on the developer side on how do we kind of help
developers build these kind of templatized
teams that ensure that these collaboration spaces are successful day
zero once they're created. And you've guys, we, call these templates, our Team's
templates yeah. So types of templates that are out there I mean I love that
background it's make everybody's life easier I actually the way I think about
it - and correct me if you feel differently - is for the average person
jumping into Teams on day one, how do we lower that barrier for adoption? How do
we make it more consistent and familiar where you see the people you're familiar
with, you know the teams that you're a part of, the applications that you use
every day, but maybe if you could give everybody a little bit of background on
the types of templates that we're enabling right now. Yeah so you know
one of the awesome things about Teams is that the collaboration spaces that
we enable team owners to create can be very, very flexible you know. They
can create teams with a very rich set of channels, apps, and tabs and you know if
we have a tendency of having too much capability that ends up kind of
confusing some of the team owners so templates as a concept actually started
in the Team's education space where when a teacher goes and creates a team, we'd
rather than leading wit h all the "hey you name your team and all the different
capabilities," we actually led with scenarios. So in the education space we
have these three types of templates - the class, the staff, and the PLC templates -
and what we found was like by leading with scenarios and setting up these
teachers with a creation experience that starts them off with an intent
really helped kind of, helped them kind of have the right mindset on figuring
out how do I want to continue setting up this space, so the class team template
type is a great example one of our most popular template types where when you go
and create this team out-of-the-box you get things like the assignments app
installed and a class notebook which is kind of the core kind of workloads that
a teacher and a student would use to go in and collaborate in teacher education.
Dude, you're my spirit animal. I can't tell you how often we're having this conv ersation on
scenarios right, and we get asked this question from customers all the
time you know because we'll get these technically savvy folks who love Teams
they're bought into it and they get it. It's how do I bring everybody else along?
How do I get them to see it? And the feedback always gives is, give people
reasons, lead with those scenarios versus this is just a chat, meeting, and
calling tool right ? Because it's much more than that. Real quick, so you
started with education, that was really cool and I didn't know that's where it started, but we've
evolved that to also meet enterprise organizations and other types of
organizations. Can you talk a little about, you know, the different types of
templates that we might have available for folks? Yeah so on the dev eloper
side, we have kind of two additional categories of templates. So I talked
about the education one, but we're starting to look into various vertical
industry so retail is a space that we're really interested in, healthcare is
another one that's been really big. In the retail space we have the se template
types like that the store template you can imagine it's a digital manifestation
of your store collaboration experience everything from the part-time worker,
full-time workers, and the management staff that manages a retail space. All
the way to we have these like a manager templates and regional manager templates
for managing multiple retail locations. On the healthcare side, we have
kind of similar concepts as well. We have a template
for hospital wards, specifically for a ward, and the idea is that these
doctors and lead nurses, who are trying to create these, again similar digital
collaboration spaces for the different working groups, that they have they can
leverage some of these template and that's just kind of the beginning of our
journey of templates. We envision a kind of a platform if you will where we're gonna
have a set of awesome first party or Microsoft created templates that help
kind of guide some of these different types of team leaders in creating the
right collaboration space, but eventually we want to extend that platform so that
any developer or even business decision makers within an organization can
contribute to, you know, this growing set of templates. That's awesome. Extending
it beyond the developer yeah? So if, awesome news if I'm a retail
organization, educational institution, health care - if I'm not one of those
organizations do I have an option to leverage templates today? Yeah, so you do.
So outside of the Microsoft-created templates you can actually fully
customize the creation of Teams today. I wouldn't call them full-fledged
templates yet just because you can't really save them, but if you ever review
some of our developer graph APIs, if you look at like the create team API, it's
actually pretty extensive. So with the recent release in February 2019, we
basically extended the create team graph API to not only allow you to create a
team but you can predefine what kind of channels you want in the team, the set of
apps you want to have pre-installed after the team is created, and even have
a set of tabs that are pre pinned in those channels and what we found is that
by leading with this kind of templatized creation of Teams it really relieves
the burden on the team owner to figure out hey how do I ensure that have
consistent digital collaboration spaces that also fit the scenarios I really
want and ensure that my day zero experience, once I invite members into
this digital collaboration space, it's clear what the intent is
and in what format they should be collaborating in. See I love that because I think of it as day
zero, like to your point, my first time I get on Teams, I've got consistency, I've got
familiarity, but then when I jump on two new teams, inside of Teams, and new
projects, it's consistent in the approach that we've structured teams and channels
or at least we give that capability with templates right which I find incredibly
valuable because then you don't need to spend time figuring out how to get work
done it's ready to go and you can just pop in and you inherently know
how to actually start working and get your job done. No, I love that. I, um, to get
this information and get started, is this on a doc site right now? Yeah. So we
have some basic documentation that just talks about the scope of the
capabilities we have as part of templates, so you can definitely read that, I guess in
the links below later on, and we also have, as I mentioned, Microsoft has
published a set of kind of starter templates, but the more extensive, awesome
stuff is actually in our graph documentation which goes into even more
details on all the specific properties that you as a developer can use to go
and set and create these templates so definitely check those out. Awesome. So
now you kind of touched on it briefly, can we get a little bit of insight on
what you're doing next? Yeah so as I mentioned you know we're taking a
very kind of platform, long term play in templates, so the things that you see
that's been you know published online right now is very developer-focused
definitely not meant for you know your your typical IT admin or even a business
decision-maker that might not be as technical. But the eventual goal is that
we want to extend this platform to A - not only allow Microsoft to go and publish
more awesome rich templates that map to business scenarios, but we also want to
enable our partners, our consultants, and an even IT admin, to go define hey what
is a template, what is the right you know patterns and practices we want to adopt
as an organization, and have those kind of surface to end-users and ultimately
our end goal is that we empower every single team owner and team creator to
not only create their own templates but eventually share those templates with
fellow peers within their organization. So you know in the teacher scenario you
can imagine a grade one math teacher comes up with
the ideal you know digital workspace for teaching whatever the math 101 class
that teacher you know our vision is that we want to empower that teacher to be
able to create that template and share that template with their fellow teachers
across you know a school district and you can see that applying to you know
retail leaders or other business decision-makers within an organization
and really just share that knowledge that exists as the best patterns and
practices that exist within a template. Wow, that is awesome. I love that I mean you're cloning your creation
essentially. I mean I think about this from a partner perspective this is
where I'd be spending a lot of time if I was a partner particularly those who
focus on adoption and change management because we know so much effort is being
put into that right now. And not even just a partner right? The partners
within an organization will also look after a change management and for these
organizations. What an incredible opportunity to create this great, almost,
I think of it as an employee lifecycle experience in Teams right, like day one,
to week one, to month one, to year one, and what do these all look like and how do
they evolve? Okay, and I know you've been working on this for a while, I guess last thing I'd
ask you here, and thank you by the way is all been insanely valuable, any advice
looking back that you give people listening in what tothink about when
they're getting started and maybe things to leverage? Yeah I think definitely as
the author of a template if you're kind of gonna explore some of the
documentation we have is really get to know and understand the constructs that
we've put forward with Teams, with channels, with apps, and tabs. Understand
all the basic Lego building blocks if you will on how you can you know build a
successful team. But don't stop there. Once you understand the various building
blocks that you can go and apply within the digital collaboration space also
understand how your end-users, your owners, your members of a team, work on a
day to day basis because by understanding the workflows that they
embody both physically and in their day-to-day lives, being able to map that
to the constructs that Microsoft teams provides, you can really make a
connection and build really rich templates that again the
idea is that day zero when they're on-boarded it's clear to them that these
are the different places they should have conversations, these are tools they
can leverage to go and get their work done, and having a deep understanding of
both these spaces prior to you you know starting creating and deploying your
first set of templates within an organization I think is the super valuable
and super important to the success of these experiences. Now that's killer. I
mean I guess if I can summarize that, and correct me if I didn't catch this
correctly, it's definitely spending the time to create a template that fits
your organization as it is today on day zero but also recognizing that that will
evolve and you'll learn a ton because we also see this big maturity curve in
Teams with a lot of customers right? They get on, they start to use some of the
basics, and then things start to explode in a very positive way and you see all
these crazy cool use cases that to your point one day we'll be able to clone and
leverage across an organization I find that really powerful. The work you guys
are doing is amazing dude thank you so much for spending some time with us.
Hopefully everybody here on the call learned something and goes and leverages
templates today but appreciate your time Phecda. Yeah good luck with templates