- [Ben] Hey everybody, hello from beautiful Austin, Texas.
My name is Ben Rudolph, and today
we are talking about some really important news,
the launch of a free version of Microsoft Teams.
Teams is part of Microsoft 365,
and it's really the home for collaboration,
for ideation, for integration, chat,
and really a way to help organizations get organized.
And to help celebrate the news, I'm really excited
to be here with two totally awesome people,
Adam Ryan from The Hustle, and Keara James
from the Microsoft Teams Product Marketing team.
Say that five times fast.
(Keara laughs)
before we get started in talking about
all the great stuff that The Hustle is doing
with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365,
Keara, give us a little bit of detail
on what happened today and what the news is.
- [Keara] Yeah. I am super excited to talk about
how there is a free version of Microsoft Teams
available in 40 languages.
So let's think about this.
Any organization, big or small,
can now achieve more together.
And that means that you get the best
of what Teams has to offer for free.
- [Ben] Awesome.
Adam, talking about The Hustle,
I'd love to know, share with the world
a little bit what The Hustle is,
and let's talk about that journey.
Because exactly what Keara said,
you were a really small organization
you were a really small organization that started to grow into a much larger organization.
that started to grow into a much larger organization.
So, let's get started.
Tell me a little bit about The Hustle.
- [Adam] Yeah, so The Hustle exists to empower
the movers, shakers, and doers of the world
to make their dent.
We've started with news.
So we send a daily email every day at 9:00 AM Pacific
to help working professionals be smarter at work.
So that's how we got started. We also do events,
and as you mentioned in the last year and a half,
we've grown from about five employees to about 20,
with two offices and a few remote employees,
so that is, Microsoft 365 has been
kind of part of that journey.
- [Ben] That's awesome, and I know we were talking
before we started, you've been in
a really interesting technology journey.
I think you said you had some Macs,
you had some Windows PCs.
You were using a really wide variety of tools
and you helped consolidate everything around Microsoft 365.
So, give me a little bit of backstory on that.
How did that work?
- [Adam] Sure, so we're budget constrained.
We started Craigslist Mac shopping to get started,
and you know, kind of as we grew,
that's what we thought that's what we were gonna be.
And then all of a sudden,
we adopted Slack, then we had G Suite,
and then our sales team wanted Office 365,
so we had all these different tools.
And it really, the problems started to get larger and larger
as our staff got larger and larger.
So, what we decided, just a few months ago now,
is to move over to Surfaces to align that stream
for those who need that features in technology.
And then as well as to go to Microsoft 365 and Teams,
and we've realized that we could
just basically streamline our entire business,
and not have to worry about
when we have an Austin office, and our San Francisco office,
and a writer in LA, and it's,
all those problems kind of just went away.
- [Ben] I think it's really interesting,
because you're talking about what I would call
a prototypical use case for why Microsoft Teams matters.
You have a decentralized work force,
you have people working all over the place,
different hours, different work styles,
variety of tools that you're trying to consolidate.
So I wanna turn things over to Keara now,
so you guys can take us through
how you are using Teams
to how you're making most of the product
and helping solve some challenges for your business.
So Keara, take it away.
- [Keara] Sure.
More than happy to.
The first place I typically start is on my mobile device.
Get up in the morning, stretch,
and then say okay, what's going on in Teams?
Do you typically use the activity feed
to find out what's going on?
- [Adam] Absolutely.
Yeah, it's how I know when someone "@s" me,
to know if I have to respond immediately,
or if there's a group chat with, you know,
a whole conversation of things,
this is right when I get my day started,
it's what I look at.
- [Keara] Sweet.
So, to that point, you can use the filter feature
to figure out what is most important to you.
Look at your messages via unreads,
@mentions, or replies.
Moving onward, you can chat one-on-one with your colleagues,
or chat in groups.
As you can see here,
looks like Patti and Megan had a meeting really quickly.
And of course, the bread and butter
of what Teams is all about -
and I'll go into this a little bit later.
So let me move on,
to show you what meetings capabilities look like.
From here, you can join a meeting
straight from your mobile device,
making it extremely easy to be on the go,
to be across time zones,
and to connect with your colleagues no matter where you are.
- [Ben] I think this is really interesting,
because you're probably the same way that I am,
where, and I think that Keara is as well,
where I get up in the morning,
and the first thing I do once my feet hit the floor
is I grab my phone to see what I missed while I was asleep,
and especially if I've got-
Microsoft is a huge company with people all over the world.
And I think it's really important to note,
that the Teams app on my mobile device
gives me almost identical functionality
to Teams that I have on the web,
through any browser and through the desktop app.
So no matter where I wanna work or how I wanna work,
I can get that full teams functionality.
- [Adam] Yeah, absolutely.
You know, we do all our one-on-ones
at local coffee shops, it's been a tradition since we started,
and I don't bring my Surface with me there,
but I don't have to leave the functionality,
like talking to the team,
if I have a quick meeting or anything in that process.
So yeah, I would say I'm on my phone more than my Surface,
but at the same time, it's the same functionality.
- [Ben] Yeah, you bet.
So Keara, where are we going next?
- [Keara] Yeah.
- [Ben] So we talked a little bit about activity feed.
What's the next clickdown on that?
- [Keara] Sure.
As we dive into what this looks like on my laptop,
you see the same exact things.
I'm gonna hit chat, you see that as well.
But here's where I really wanna spend a lot of time.
Thinking about Teams and how you organize them.
Teams can be organized based on function, project, task,
or Finity Group,
making it really easy to stay organized
and understand where the conversation is happening.
Many times we're on the go,
we're trying to get a lot of things done,
what channel do I go to,
or where do I go to figure out certain information?
Well, Teams makes that really easy for you.
As you can see here, there are three teams.
Events, Advertising, and Editorial.
And underneath each of these, you'll notice channels.
As you can see here,
there's a 2X: Woman of the Year event that's happening.
Under Advertising, we have best practices.
And under Editorial,
there are different stories that are happening.
Adam, could you share a little bit more
about how The Hustle uses Teams?
- [Adam] Yeah, so I think it's important to know
context of how we were working before.
We were in Slack, and essentially I made the joke one time,
that I had like 400 different group chats
and I never knew where to go.
But it also had all this information
that I wanted to archive
and know to go back to and reference.
And so, the way we built our teams is based by department.
There's the overall team,
and then each channel underneath that
or just fun stuff.
So we have a general channel,
where we just talk about, you know,
the Westworld season finale last month
or all the rumors of Friends relaunching, right?
So that's - we use it for different purposes,
but the key piece is being able
to just go back and know where it's at,
and be organized that way.
- [Ben] Yeah first,
I think we'll do a second video on Westworld after this,
and that'll be a two-hour video
and we'll just talk about the last episode.
But from an architectural perspective,
I love the way that you are setting this up.
You've got our broader teams,
for kind of macro-level stuff like advertising,
and then each individual project has its own chat.
because some of those might be long projects,
some of them might be very finite projects.
- [Adam] Right, yeah, absolutely.
So we - two examples there.
So 2X: Woman of the Year is a national event series
that we do throughout the entire year.
So that is an event that is constantly being used
and talked about and discussed.
Under Advertising, we have certain clients,
who- that only might be a four-week campaign,
but at the same time,
there's a ton of stuff that goes into that
and a lot of files being managed
and we just wanna keep that organized.
So we use that for both short- and long-term.
It's just basically use case of how much usage
we're gonna need to communicate about that.
- [Ben] It's great to see 'em.
I love the level of organization.
I'm kind of an operational person,
so seeing this level of precision,
it just warms my heart, it's just great to see.
- [Adam] Ah, yes.
- [Ben] But you touched on something really important.
You talked about things you wanted to archive,
and stuff you wanted to find.
There's features and functionality within Teams
that makes that incredibly easy.
Keara, I want you to show us the magic
of that command bar up top.
- [Keara] Well, of course.
Okay, so - your command bar.
This is where magic really happens.
So you can forward slash,
and see a list of tons of commands that allow you
to make it really easy to connect with people.
Or, for example, find your saved messages.
I put forward slash save,
the magic is happening,
and there you have it, all your saved messages,
all in one spot, making it super easy
to figure out what it is you're looking for.
So, so long are the days
that you're like, wait, where did I save this,
did I talk to someone verbally about it?
Now you can just check your messages easily
and find what you're looking for.
- [Adam] Yeah, I think, you know,
moving a team over to a new piece of software
is incredibly complicated, where it should be.
And you know, when we first were going over
the functionalities of Teams,
it's like, whoa, this is pretty robust,
and we can kind of have all this stuff here.
But to our surprise, like the first 90% was super simple.
Like everything to come on board,
and the command bar, and all that good stuff.
And then you find out Easter eggs along the way,
that you're like, wow,
I did not know you could make your own meme,
and all these other things,
that are the fun things that you find along the way,
that doesn't necessarily come
with the description at the beginning.
- [Keara] Yeah, I really love
how you talked about getting people onto Teams.
And so one great feature that you can do,
is actually send an email to a Team's channel,
making it really easy.
You hit this ellipsis, you get the email address,
put that in your To: field, it goes right to the channel.
Increased accountability and transparency,
and then all your conversations can happen
right in the Teams environment,
making it really easy and simple for people getting onboard.
And then when you think about that new employee
that joins the team as The Hustle continues to grow,
you don't have to sit down
and forward all the emails from the past.
Go into a channel, add them to a team,
have them scroll through,
and they can get caught up really easily.
- [Adam] Yeah.
- [Ben] It's a really, this is something,
if I'm gonna make a personal metaphor here,
I think I would've said like--
I'm a video game guy.
Love to play games, love my Xbox.
My favorite games are the ones
that I can just pick up and play.
And there are some of those games,
where everybody can sit down on the couch,
you pick it up, you play, you have a great time.
But then to get great at it, that last 10%,
there's just more and more functionality,
different play modes.
Teams feels very similar to me,
where anybody can jump in, and in just a couple of minutes,
you can get up and running, very simple to use.
But to your point, there's always new things being added,
there's lot of stuff that you can add on,
and everybody can start to discover
their own way to make it their own.
- [Adam] Yeah, we don't have any IT staff,
or technical staff as a whopping 19-person company.
And so, as we continued to onboard this,
we really just relied on our end-users
to learn how to do it,
and we haven't had many issues with that.
When talking about onboarding staff,
this also allows that to be a lot easier.
We have a tab called best practices.
And so as we onboard staff, all that,
all those files and everything's right there,
and I no longer have to do an hour session
of digging through the different storage to find those.
- [Ben] It's great.
So we talked a little bit about activity feed,
we talked about finding old messages,
and all the cool stuff you can do in the command bar,
we talked about chat.
Now the thing that we need to talk about is,
let's get to work.
So I'd love to talk a little bit about how,
knowing that you have an office in San Francisco,
you have an office in Austin,
you have writers all over the place,
how you're using the power of Microsoft 365 and Teams
to collaborate and really get work done.
- [Adam] Yeah, you know,
the ability right now,
we have a lot of Word docs, right, that we use,
whether it's from our editorial staff
to talk about different pieces for the day,
or our sales team sharing Powerpoint,
whatever it is.
And so, what we've really loved, and a key feature for us
is being able to edit those docs in Teams,
and then be able to talk about them on the same thread.
And then those files are saved.
So, a great example is we have a contest right now
for our sales team of who can send the best cold email.
And you archive those in a document,
that becomes a training document
for the next time that I have a new hire,
but at the same time, we're all talking and collaborating
on that document pretty easily.
- [Ben] Nice.
Keara, you wanna show us how it works?
I see you already have a document pulled up.
- [Keara] Yeah!
So right within the Teams interface,
you can co-author and co-edit in real time.
Now, one single source of truth,
making it very easy
and you no longer have to worry about version control,
which many of us remember.
And as you spoke to earlier,
around, wait, who has what version,
and it gets really annoying.
- [Ben] "Version Final Final number 49", right?
We've all been in that situation.
- [Keara] Yeah, something about those naming conventions.
In any case, you can edit
right within the Teams environment.
I will hit edit in Teams.
My document pops up.
- [Adam] There it is.
- [Keara] And voila, it's like magic.
You can simply add comments.
As you can see, they populate right on the side here.
Very robust Word experience.
And more importantly, as it's been mentioned,
you can chat alongside the document.
Say you're co-authoring and co-collaborating in real time,
there's a deadline happening, right?
So people are constantly trying to hurry
and trying to get all the information that they need.
So, instead of maybe, this gets a little cumbersome,
you can simply meet now.
And as I can see here,
one of my colleagues is already online for a quick scrum.
I'm gonna join this meeting.
Okay.
And there we are.
Little preview to make sure everything looks good.
- [Adam] Voila.
- [Ben] Here we are.
So this is one of those features that I think is,
I would say almost underrated.
Because we know the power of chat,
but the ability, again,
not to have to hop out and open up Skype for business,
or use a third party tool,
or pull out my mobile device and go from there,
it's just like we're working in chat,
maybe something isn't quite clear,
because I'm sure that might happen once or twice
when you're working on a deadline,
the ability to effectively go face-to-face
even if we're 1500 miles apart,
really really powerful stuff.
- [Adam] We have a split office.
So I have our events team based in San Francisco,
and our sales team is based here.
And I always say, chat is great for speed,
but every now and then we wanna be human,
and just pull up the quick scrum
and it'll be five minutes or less
and then you're good to go.
- [Ben] It's great.
And I also like the extensibility that we have,
from even just the Office 365 experience,
where I have things like Word and Powerpoint.
I can edit it right in Teams,
using the built-in interface,
but if I want, I can open up those desktop apps
and get the full desktop experience
if I want a little bit deeper functionality
or I wanna expand, or whatever the case may be.
Really flexible in how we work.
So meeting functionality is one of those tools
that really helps improve efficiency.
Now I don't have to jump out to a third-party tool,
I can have a chat, I can have an audio discussion,
I can have a video call, all from the Teams environment.
And this is something you're using for other tools as well,
'cause there were some things that, you know,
Microsoft 365 and Teams has really helped to streamline,
but there were some processes you already had in place.
You're just making them more efficient in Teams.
Tell me a little bit more about that.
- [Adam] Yeah.
So we have a massive events team of two people.
- [Ben] Okay, huge.
- [Adam] And they pull off about 30 events a year,
with 10,000 attendees.
And they had a process in place
before we moved to Microsoft 365,
using a tool called Asana.
It was a project management tool,
and it was essentially their Bible
of how they managed all the projects they were working on.
So when telling them that we were transitioning to Teams,
that was the first thing that they asked.
- [Ben] Moment of panic.
- [Adam] Yeah, like oh my god, are you getting rid of this?
And to our surprise, and pretty awesomely,
we learned that Microsoft 365 and Teams
had over 100 integrations, one of them being Asana.
And so as we kind of went into it,
we saw that with just like, really like two clicks,
the integration was done, it was loaded in,
and now, through the channel 2X: Woman of the Year,
which is one of our event initiatives,
the team can manage their Asana tasks that they're doing,
they can check it off, they can add one in,
basically it's full functionality,
while also still conversing and never leaving the screen.
So it actually, it made
our very detail, process-oriented team even more efficient,
which was great.
- [Ben] Okay.
Keara, why don't you show us how it works?
- [Keara] Yeah.
So you can simply add a new task here,
check them off the box
when you're done completing your task,
and again, increase transparency and accountability.
Everybody knows what's going on.
But even great that you mention,
more apps and extensibility for your team.
So outside of our Office 365 apps,
we have so many other apps
that you can integrate within Teams,
making it really easy to customize the way you work.
- [Adam] Absolutely.
- [Ben] And speaking of extensibility and collaboration,
we can actually make our team more extensible
to people outside our organization, right,
'cause I can add guests to a channel like this
to collaborate people who may not be working at The Hustle.
So, show me that as well.
- [Keara] Yeah.
So quickly, as you see up here, this team has guests,
letting you know that there are other people
outside of your workforce
that are part of this particular team.
So just a great reminder to let you know that
one, you have the full power
of having everybody work on the same thing
no matter where they work,
and then two, making sure they have access to everything
makes your life that much easier.
No more having to jump between email and chats,
trying to figure out what your vendors or suppliers have.
They can be joined into the team really easily.
- [Adam] Yeah, we love this feature.
So we have a ton of speakers that we work with.
So we can just add them right into that event,
or for our advertising side, we have a lot of our partners,
and we'll just put them right into their channel,
they only have access to that,
but it allows us to quickly communicate with them
instead of setting up calls
and doing the whole process there.
- [Ben] This is great,
and I think this is a really good spot to wrap things up.
We started with rolling out of bed
and checking our activity feed,
we've moved all the way through
collaborating with people outside of the organizations,
we've talked meetings, we've talked command bar,
we've talked Word integration,
we've talked a ton of great stuff about Teams.
Before we go, I wanna make sure that you get a chance
to tell everybody, where do I get The Hustle?
- [Adam] Absolutely.
So if you want to have our daily emails sent to you,
to get the tech and business news,
you can go to thehustle.co, put in your email address,
and tomorrow morning we'll be
your best friend with the news.
- [Ben] Awesome, so make sure you sign up for that.
And also make sure you go to microsoft.com/teams,
remember, free version of Teams available today
in 40 different languages,
ready for every person, every organization,
big or small, to start collaborating,
start to make more out of your day.
Thanks for hanging out, we'll see you in the next one.