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Speaker 1:
I want to welcome you to today's webinar, Manage Your Time And team With Microsoft Teams.
Greg Lutes:
A lot of people ask what Microsoft Teams is and how it's used and, of course, what to use it for, so let me take a bit of a step back and talk about how you currently work. Currently a lot of us depend quite a bit on email, right? This stuff. Right. Here's an email that Sarah sent me with some slides for Microsoft Teams. This is a perfect example of how a lot of us currently work, and that's actually a bit of a problem. Let me show you why. See, Sarah sends me this email here and if I have to refer back to the email, then I've got to go back to my inbox and take a look at the email, and first find Sarah's email and find the attachment. Excuse me. Then what I do is I download this thing, so Sarah has a copy, right? I download a copy of this, and now I have a copy and Sarah's got a copy, so if I make any changes to it, I've got to email this back to Sarah.
So now I've got the original. Plus, of course, I'll save a version of it, right? So now I've got two copies. Sarah has the original, original. Right? And I give her a copy, so now she's got two copies. Already it's starting to get a little confusing, and the problem with that is that a lot of times we don't end up cleaning up these copies, so I save another copy of it. Right? Sarah makes some changes, emails it back to me, and so what do I do? I open it up and I save yet another copy. If anybody else needs this presentation, then Sarah and I have to figure out which is the good copy, which is the most recent copy, and the whole time your inbox is filling up with all these different attachments. And if anybody else needs a copy of this, again, they've got to rely on Sarah and myself as far as who's got the original copy, the good copy.
This is where Microsoft Teams is a little bit different. The same idea, right? What we do is we create a team, Sarah and I. We create this team and it's called Teams Training, and Sarah and I can have a conversation back and forth. This is where we work, so this is where I would upload that presentation that I downloaded from Sarah. Let me just switch my view here. Of course, I got to go find this thing and again. Anyways, I'll pretend this is it. I upload it and then what this is, is this is Sarah and I working inside of a team together, but we're working off the same copy. We're working off the exact same copy, the two of us. If there's any other files, then we just make sure that we save those files and upload them to our team. Here I've downloaded it. Now I would do is I would go over to Teams and I would upload it into Teams and this is where we would work. Normally I would be able to find this. Really super simple. Anyways.
The neat thing with Teams, though, is that if we make any edits, I don't have to leave Teams, so if I want to make a change to anything, I upload it and I could upload ... Here I've got some minutes and I'll also upload an Excel file here, and this would be all of our different working files and this is where we would work from. So if Sarah wants me to make some changes to something, then I would work in here. I could click on the presentation that she wants me to work on and I don't have to wait for PowerPoint to open up. If I need to make a change to it, then I can click on Edit and I'm still inside of Teams. I haven't left Teams. I'm not waiting for PowerPoint to open up. All right?
I'm making changes right inside of Teams, and the moment that I change anything inside the presentation, as you can see at the top here, it's saved. I didn't have to save this. I didn't have to wait for it to be saved. If the computer crashes, the internet cuts out, anything like that, it's saved. I can insert slides, layouts. I can do pretty much what I normally do. When I'm finished editing, like normal, I could just close the file and I've made a change to it. I don't have to email Sarah. If there are specific things that Sarah wants me to change within the presentation, then I can go back inside the presentation and we can start a conversation about this thing, and what it's not is it's not email back and forth between Sarah and I. It's the two of us having a conversation about changing slide three and putting in a picture.
Speaker 1:
Greg, we have a question here that I think you can address. Can multiple people be modifying a document at the same time?
Greg Lutes:
Oh my gosh, yes, and that's kind of the whole point, is that all of us are working on the same document at the same time, all making changes and all seeing those changes, and talking and collaborating, because if I want, I can-
Speaker 1:
How does that work for version history, as well?
Greg Lutes:
The version history is still controlled through SharePoint. I haven't really kind of talked about that part yet because some of this stuff does get a little confusing. When you create a team, it also creates a SharePoint site, so Teams is used for collaboration. If we're going to work together, if we're going to work on files together, if we're going to make changes together, have conversations, we do all of that team work through Teams. But then if we're concerned about security, version history, document management, information management, all of that stuff is still controlled through SharePoint, through their document management, so when you create a team, you also create a SharePoint site. This is the Teams Training SharePoint site, and when I created the team, it also created this. Here's all my documents. Then if I need to control version history or anything like that, then all of that is still done through SharePoint.
Right? See? This way we can roll back a version or do what we need to do. I can have my information management policy so that we're not storing credit card numbers, we're not storing social insurance numbers, we're not storing these things in the wrong spot. Proper stuff is being stored in the proper libraries and things are not being saved when they shouldn't be saved, and all of that stuff is still managed through SharePoint. That's kind of the really cool part, is that when you create a team, you create all these other things that you can use. SharePoint is our presentation. It's our document management, but it's also our information management, so if people are looking for stuff, they can search through SharePoint and find what they're looking for. If they can't, believe me, that's a whole other topic. SharePoint is a whole other topic, and setting SharePoint up correctly is a whole other topic.
You know, you shouldn't be so worried about document names as you are the metadata and tagging it and getting SharePoint to help you with that. That's how you find your stuff, but this, this is how you work, so within the team you get a library, a SharePoint library, and of course you get conversations. This is where I can talk to the team and say, "Hey, team. We're having a meeting. Hey, team. Here's some information. Hey, team. I just uploaded a brand new file that you're probably going to be interested in." Then to extend the functionality of the team, you add these different tabs, like a wiki. All the different terms and terminology that we use within the team can be stored here. Here I've got one called Teams Training, and this is a OneNote notebook, so this way, when our team meets, we can store the meeting minutes here. Any to-dos, different things that we have to do, we can store it all here.
If they do want to store different things like meeting minutes ... Oops. Misspelled that. Let me just rename it. So, obviously, you can rename sections. I can add this, Things To Do, and if I'd like my own local copy of this, then I can just edit this in OneNote and this creates a local copy on my machine or I can edit this online here, but this way every team member has this list. Every team member can work from this list. If I add another tab here, these are all the different tabs that you can add and this extends the functionality of Teams. Look at them all. Just an incredible amount. If our team ... I don't know. If our team works off an Excel spreadsheet and we work off the spreadsheet all the time, then I can just add the spreadsheet as a tab and then you're not having to open it up. It's right here. Or in this case, here I've got this general course [inaudible 00:14:05] cleanup and here I've got a course for a spreadsheet and then here I've got the actual report.
This report, this is a Power BI report, so I've created an interactive report, basically, so I can sort and filter, all without opening it up or all without opening up Power BI, so I can keep adding functionality to this team so that we're sharing information. We're sharing everything that we need to share, but in the same spot and not in multiple places, and some of these are actually quite useful, like SurveyMonkey. Instead of me sending out a link in your inbox and you having to remember or find that link that I sent you in your inbox, you come to the team, and you fill out the team survey. You even have other things like new stuff for creating plans or for creating forms. Stream, Stream will actually take any video and transcribe the video word for word. You can edit the transcription. You can even have it transcribed in a completely different language, so if you have a video and it's in a different language, you can have it transcribed to whatever language that you want.
Speaker 1:
Greg, we have a question here.
Greg Lutes:
Yes.
Speaker 1:
Can you go over the difference between a wiki and OneNote when it comes to Teams?
Greg Lutes:
Yeah. A wiki is really just a blank page. It's a blank page that doesn't really connect to anything. It's more like a static document. I'm not a fan of a wiki page. If you're going to build a wiki, you might as well use OneNote, in my personal opinion. OneNote talks to absolutely every single product that you have. OneNote is even a printer, so if for whatever reason you don't have a button for OneNote, you click on File, you click on Print, and send it to OneNote, whereas a wiki is like a Word document. It's worse. It's like Notepad. I don't really use the thing.
You have some other functionality too that is built within Teams to keep you here. I mean, obviously I can have chats with different people, right? There are some of the different people that recently I've had chats with, and when you have a chat with somebody, you can share files. I can see who this person is in the organization as I'm talking to them, so it shows me where in the hierarchy this person actually is, who reports to them. Here's she's head of the office. All my activity with Irene is here. Lately we haven't had any activity in the Teams together. There's also bots that you can chat too. Here I've got a bot that I use called Chipmunk. This is one of the bots that I use to travel, so if I'm going to Toronto, to Onuoha, painless, which means no stopovers ... Not that there should be, but sometimes there is, believe it or not, and I want to go on December 3rd. Then I don't have to do it. I don't have to look for these flights.
He comes back and as you can see here, there's one from Thunder Bay. It tells me how much it is, my different flight options. I can show different hotel options, create a fare alert, and I can cycle through the different options that he's given me. I've searched 91 itineraries. If you're looking for one specific, let me know. I can create fare alerts, sort it by the cheapest, and it's doing this so that I don't actually have to do this. Or T-Bot. T-Bot helps me to figure out how to use Teams and create channels and do what I need to do. I've got help and how-tos, different videos that I can watch. I can see what's new in Teams and see the different things that themselves added, and when I am having a conversation with somebody like Irene, I can start a video conversation, an audio conversation, or I can invite other people to this chat, so now we're having a meeting.
Again, to keep you in Teams, speaking of meetings, all of my meetings are here, so when I click on Meetings, they show up here. This is my next meeting that I have. For some reason this one is not in my calendar, but anyways. I can see that yeah, Thursday, December 6th, I accepted this meeting, but if for some reason I can't, I don't have to go looking for this stuff. I don't have to go through my inbox trying to find the invitation or go into my calendar and reject it that way. It's all here in the same program that I'm using to talk and chat and have meetings in. I can mark it as tentative and now it's tentative. As far as any files that I've been working with, whether I've been chatting with people and sending files back and forth that way, or whether I've been working in Teams, all of the files that I've been working with, all sit here.
Speaker 1:
We have one question. You're showing files that you're sharing with myself or with Irene. What would happen to those files if one of us left the organization?
Greg Lutes:
The files would still stay there. It's kind of funny you asked that question. This is a Courseware cleanup, and although I don't have a chat with Sandra, if I did ... Sandra is no longer with us, but all the files and everything, the conversations that I've had with her, they're here. They don't go away, so for historic purposes, this is terrific. This is perfect. When employees leave, we've captured everything that they've worked on. We haven't lost anything, including the conversations that they've had. When it's sitting in email, it's a nightmare to go through and find different things when people have left, and you're going through their inbox trying to find that attachment, that conversation, or whatever.
With Teams that doesn't happen, because with Teams you're not supposed to be sending files back and forth, not through email. If you want to send me a file, then you go to chat and you have a chat with me. These are some of the different people that I have had chats with and sent files back and forth with. My contacts are here. No one in my favorites. Then if I want to a chat with somebody, then I can click in here and start typing their name. That's my boss, so I start having a chat with him or Sarah.
Speaker 1:
So what if I had a created a team that we were both working within but I left the organization? Does anything happen to that team or the files in that case?
Greg Lutes:
None at all. No, and that's exactly what happened here with Sandra. Sandra created the Courseware cleanup team. She left, but obviously we're still cleaning up Courseware material. That's kind of a constant project and we're still having conversations with different people. Even though she has left the team, it doesn't affect anything at all, and remember there's a SharePoint site that's tied into this, so all these files that are here, all this stuff sits on a SharePoint site. So this way we can manage this stuff properly, but that also means that your IT people have to understand how some of this stuff works in the back end. I know that sounds really straightforward and of course they do and absolutely, but you might be shocked.
There are different times that I catch IT deleting accounts, user accounts. You're not supposed to do that, and that's why Sandra still appears here. It's because you disable her account. You don't delete it. Her account goes into former employees or whatever OU that you want to use, but you start deleting user accounts and you're going to have problems with this. You start using the tools improperly and yeah, you're going to hate SharePoint. You're going to hate Teams, because things are disappearing and things are not happening the way that you kind of expect them to.
Speaker 1:
So in the case of this Courseware cleanup, would you then be able to add another team member who's maybe taking over from Sandra to the team and be able to continue working?
Greg Lutes:
Absolutely. As you can see here, for more options you've got these three dots, right? I can click on the three dots and I can manage this team. Here's all the different users and that is Sandra, but having a synchronization issue right now. These are pending requests of people that have asked to join the team. These are the different channels that belong to the team. These are my different settings as far as team picture and different permissions that people, what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do in the team. If someone is a guest, these are the guest permissions. Mentions.
Speaker 1:
Would guests apply to external users to your organization?
Greg Lutes:
Yeah. It could. Yes, it could. It's one of the options that we have, is whether or not external people can join our teams and see our teams, so that's kind of an organization decision, but yes, it is possible to have people from outside the organization join the team and join it as a guest. It eliminates FTPs. You don't have to worry about file sizes anymore. You don't have to worry about versions anymore. Conversations between outside vendors and yourself are all captured within the conversations, so if you leave, we historically can see exactly what happened between you and the vendor. If I do want to have people join the team directly, then I can generate a code and then when they go to join the team down here, it'll ask them for the code. So I can go to Join Team and this would be the code that I would enter to join the team.
So they make it very, very simple, very fluid, very easy not only to create a team, but to join it and to manage it so that you can add additional tabs and share information and collaborate with your team. When you're looking for the files that you're working on, you go to Files. You don't go looking for them yourself. Chances are, it's stuff that you've recently been working on, and if it's not, then click on Teams and then rather than go through each individual team and every single file folder, these are all your files and teams. And yes, I can search, so I can search for files. I can search for people. I can search for anything that I need to search for, in one spot.
I'm not having to search the G drive and then search the P drive and then search the A drive, and maybe it's in SharePoint. Well, maybe it's here. Maybe I put it in my inbox. When you have stuff scattered all over the place, as organized as you think you're organized, you're not. I love watching people try and organize their inbox. Your inbox is the absolutely worst place to store information, and if you're really honest with yourself, you know that's right. How long does it take you to find stuff in your inbox? How many times do you go to your inbox to look for stuff? How many times do you type in somebody's name and just look through a sea of information and attachments, and really and truly you don't know what you have? Because there's phone numbers, there's directions, there's instructions, there's all this information that is embedded in that email that doesn't go anywhere, that can't be indexed, that can't be organized in any meaningful, and with Teams I can do that.
I can organize it so these are our files and here's the Courseware spreadsheet, and please update the spreadsheet, and when you update the spreadsheet it automatically updates the report. It's not anybody asking me, "Well, how do you update the report? Is the report updated? Did anybody update the spreadsheet?" You'll know, and this happens with communication and I don't care what company you're with right now. A lot of us have trouble with communication and it's because do I send them a text? Do I send them an email? Do I send them a chat? Do I put it on SharePoint? Do I, do I, do I? There's all these different avenues, and instead you create a policy so that everything goes through Teams. You're trying to get a hold of somebody? Open up a chat, because if you miss the chat, it creates an email and automatically sends you whatever the person said in the chat in an email. So as you're sitting on the subway, your email goes off. You open up your email and go, "Oh, somebody was trying to get a hold of me on Teams."
But in all honesty, I've got Teams installed on my cellphone and it works, acts, and looks identical to this, so really they should get me anywhere. But let's say they don't. Say I don't have Teams open. Say I'm on an airplane. I'm in the air. When I land, all the conversations that I missed are sitting in my inbox and I can respond either in my inbox or I can go right to the chat, see the chat that I missed, and talk to Sarah. "Hey, sorry I missed your chat." And Sarah can still send me files even though I'm not online, I'm not there, I'm not chatting with her, but I get a notification that she's done that as soon as I am online. So again, it's not Sarah saying, "Oh, I uploaded some stuff to SharePoint. I want you to take a look at it." I'll know, right?
We're part of the same team, as part of the same chat, and because she's uploading it through Teams, it's updating in SharePoint, and because she did it through Teams, I'll get a notification that she updated a file. So all your alerts, your notifications, all that stuff works. All the document management, all your workflows, and don't even get me started with flows. That's a whole other thing that I can do, because now this is in SharePoint, and because this is in SharePoint and because this is a library within SharePoint, I can start creating workflows and setting up approval workflows or Twitter workflows or Instagram workflows or whatever, all to manage my team. It's a lot. It's a very different way of working, but I can honestly tell you this is the absolute best way to work.
Sending attachments is the absolute worst way to work. Managing information through your inbox is the absolute worst way to work. Managing information through Teams using these tabs to add OneNote notebooks or to add a form so that people aren't looking through their inbox, trying to look for that form that you've sent them, it's in the team. As far as who creates teams and when they create teams, you're going to have to set up policies and procedures just like everything else. Right? When SharePoint came along, when network drives came along, when email came along, we all had to create policies and procedures for these things so that people at least had some sort of baseline for what we considered common sense. Right? Common sense is not always so common. I'm not trying to be mean. We just all have different opinions of different things. So you sit down you say, "Look, this is when you create a team. This is when you put files inside of the library, and somebody has to be responsible for managing the versions and managing the history and managing the workflows and managing the permissions."
So yeah, there's a lot to this, but what you get out of it is that you're not looking for anything anymore. You're communicating way better, and it's because you're doing it through one product. Flipping back and forth between screens, between different programs, it's not an efficient use of your time. The amount of time that you waste looking for stuff is incredible, when really and truly here I'm having a chat and look at my chats for a minute, all right? Just to show you how all this really works, right? Here's Hipmunk. Here's Irene. He's Frieda. Here's T-Bot.
These are my suggestions. None of these are my boss, all right? My boss' name is Robert, right? Robert Stanley, so I can type Robert's name here. There he is. There's all our chats, all saved. I'm not going to actually let you read them, but you get the idea. Same with Sandra. Of course, give me a hard time, but yes. Any chat that I've had ... Here's Jeff. Here's somebody that I chat with every once in a while. Love it, absolutely love it. Again, I'm not going to let you actually read these things. Not that there's anything in them, but you get the idea. It's saved. It's not actually here, but when I type the person's name, it remembers all the files and the chats and everything that we did together. It's not in my inbox.
As far as chat, I don't think I can show you anything new. You know stickers and happy faces, and yeah, all this other stuff. I don't really use all this. That's not my thing, but I could send you a stock quote or I could send you information about a place that I went to or the weather, give you the latest weather report and say, "Hey, look, this is what it's doing in Toronto." Or Wikipedia and say, "Hey, this is the person that invented," I don't know, "popcorn" or whatever is relevant to our chat. Or a YouTube video. Again, not something in my inbox that I've got to send to you. I can do this not just here, but when I'm chatting to my whole team. "Hey, team. Here's a really cool video that I want you to watch."
Then if we have a new team member, I don't have to remember to send him the video. "Oh, yeah. It's right. We never sent you the video. Oh, yeah. We never sent you the form. Oh, yeah. We never sent you." No. Doesn't happen. Anybody is part of Courseware cleanup, they come up here. They come here and they got caught up. They get caught up in the conversation. They get caught up in the files. All we have to do is add them to the team, and magically they've got access to everything that they need, all the conversations, everything that we talked about. All right? Here's the spreadsheet. Here's the conversation that we had on the spreadsheet, and none of it is erased. Even within this conversation, I can still start my video. I have my audio happening, so we're literally talking and working on the same thing at the same time.
Speaker 1:
Greg, can you show how you've opened the conversation on the side? A few people aren't seeing it when they open a file in Teams.
Greg Lutes:
Absolutely. Let me do it right from scratch, all right? So I'm going to go into a file here that I've got and I'm just going to upload something. I'll actually look some file. Let's say I have a decent file here. I'm just going to upload a decent file and then I'm going to add it as a tab. That's how we see it, as a tab. I'll choose Excel. Of course, I don't want to call it Excel. Right? I want to call it Olympic Report, and that's the file. Now, when I do this, this is automatically going to post to the channel and tell the entire team that I've done this. What it'll happen on their screen is Teams start to flash. A little notification pops up, much like when you get a new email from Outlook, so all my team members now know that this has happened. If they don't have Teams open, they'll get an email that says this just happened, so either way they can't avoid it. They're going to know this just happened.
To get the conversation to happen, here I've already got my conversation tab open, so that's cheating. All right. Then if I want to have a conversation about this, that's what this bubble is for. Let me see if I can move this down a little bit and get this out of the way. All right. That's the conversation, all right? This one is going to expand the tab so that it becomes full screen. That one, you probably could have guessed. Refresh, and of course I've got more options. Not that I've got a lot, but really the other option would be to copy a link to this and then in a chat conversation I could send somebody a link that would take them right to this tab as long as they have permission to do that.
This is where we have the conversation. Right. Send emojis or, I don't know, whatever. Right, little stickers. I don't know. Honestly, I don't use this stuff, so whatever you use it for. That's how we can have a conversation on any one of these tabs and then, again, it's not something in your inbox, because if it sits in your inbox, nobody else has access to it, and there's more. I mean, there's a lot. I've got a Secretary Bot. This is my Hipmunk. I have a calendar bot for helping book stuff. My Secretary Bot helps me book time and schedule meetings with different people. I can sign into the Office and give her access to my calendar and all kinds of different things that she does. She has her own blog, so it talks about how all this stuff actually works and what she does. There's little tutorials and frequently asked questions on all of these bots. There's a wiki bot. There's all kinds of really neat stuff.
It's just, honestly, it's insane. I could probably spend the next couple of hours just showing you all the different bots that you have. If you have no idea what a bot is, you better. You better start using these things. You better start getting used to this, because a lot of people are using these. Social media is an obvious one, but people are now starting to use them, like myself, for booking appointments. When you send me a calendar invite or you ask me for a certain date, it's my Secretary Bot that responds. It looks like it's me, but it's not. This way, because I teach all day during the day, I don't have to respond to different requests for my time. My calendar can be booking up as I'm teaching, and I'll get a list of all my new appointments and all that stuff at the end of the day.
Or who. Our company is really, really big, so I can say, "Well, who knows about marketing? Who knows about whatever? Who knows about policies and procedures? Who knows about who works with this person, who reports to this person?" So this way I can find information in my organization almost like Google. This is, in a sense, almost like Google. This can be pre-populated, so there's different organization specific questions that you can ask, and who comes back with the correct answer.
Speaker 1:
Do you have a suggestion for something that can like track tasks, or like a project management tools or bots?
Greg Lutes:
Yeah. You've got Planner, which helps you out, and if I go to the store here, yeah, specifically you have project management bots. Right. As you can see, it just depends specifically on what it is that you're looking to do. Track phone calls, track activity. There may be some flows that you can use if it's tied into your inbox or if it's tied into SharePoint or any Microsoft product, or even non-Microsoft products, for that matter. There may be a bunch of flows that you could use for project management there, but yeah, it's insane. There's a lot. I like Planner. It's a Microsoft product. It's pretty cool, and then there are some flows that go with Planner that I quite like as well. I mean, as you can see, like it's just this is insane. You've got stuff for productivity.
There's even human resource stuff like Leo. Leo sends you different articles and things that will help you become a better manager. Or POPin. Instead of doing employee surveys and things, there's other metrics and things that it follows and watches to tell you how satisfied your employees are or team members. There's just ... it's insane. Stuff for education to help people out. Get different people educated on different topics, but in a more interesting way. Stuff for developers like GitHub. It's somewhere in here. Yeah, there's GitHub. That would just be a tab. Instead of having to log in all the time, all the GitHub projects would just be part of the team. In fact, people may not even know what GitHub, yet you're giving them access to it and the power of being able to search GitHub for whatever snippet that they need. Stuff for analytics.
They keep adding more and more all the time, and this stuff just doesn't work with Microsoft products. This works with everything. For the first time, Microsoft is playing very well with others. It's shocking, almost. It's incredible. Different connectors, so some of this would be paid services where you can connect with the service, but actually bring the service in. Bing News, you could add it as a tab. Then there's stuff that'll actually go through the news and summarize articles for you. There's quite a bit. They've organized them in tabs. These are bots and these are some of the different apps. There's quite a bit. There's a lot to this thing, and it's integrated into absolutely every single product that you have. It's a pretty powerful product. Any questions at all?
Speaker 1:
Okay, so one I have here. Are there any business value KPI metrics from other organizations that have deployed and used Teams?
Greg Lutes:
Sorry, say that question again.
Speaker 1:
If there's any metrics that related to the business value for implementing Teams in an organization.
Greg Lutes:
Not off the top of my head. I can't think of anybody that's done any studies other than I've probably deployed Teams, I don't know, I guess to probably 30 different companies now, large organizations, and governments and municipalities, and the productivity is incredible. The change in productivity is incredible. I know even for the groups that I work with, it saves us so much time and so much effort and frustration. There was a period of time where Teams wasn't available to me and it really felt like a step backwards, but I've seen it and gone back to the company later after implementing, and they were so much more organized, so much less reliant on email for information and for the sharing of information. In fact, the amount of email that most organizations have usually really trails off, really cuts off, and comes mainly just outside email, outside contacts that don't use Teams.
I mean, you just imagine. Every document becomes a single point of truth. Every document that you work with, when you work with Teams, you know that's the original. You know that there's copies. You know there's versions behind it. You know that it doesn't exist in multiple file folders or in multiple places, because people will squirrel things away, and if they have sensitive information or it has information that needs to expire or needs to go away, you're responsible for that and how do you know what somebody is saving on a G drive or a P drive? You don't have any system right now that tells you somebody is storing credit card numbers, any file folder on a network drive. You have nothing that does that. Yet, if they get caught, you're responsible. How do you police that? This is the only way. Or some other document management system like Hummingbird or whatever. You know Norton Storage Vault or McAfee's vault.
Speaker 1:
I have one more question that I think is great to close on. This person sees Teams as a part of their Office 365 apps. How should they start introducing it to colleagues and setting up Teams? So where is a good place to start with this?
Greg Lutes:
A good place to start is to step up departmental teams so that you have marketing, you have accounting, et cetera, and to start hosting meetings, having conversations, and just literally start using it. Create a policy that internal attachments are not to be sent back and forth between employees. No attachments are to be sent. They are to either send a link to a network drive from now on or it's a file that they send in Teams. Whether that happens in a chat or that that happens in a Team, again, other policies should be developed based on that, so if they are doing project management, it needs to go through Teams. If it's kind of a template one off, whatever, then it can happen in the chat. But if it's an official document where versions and copies need to be keep tracked of, it needs to happen within a team, and that has to happen through policies.
But if you were to look at Office 365 as a hierarchy, Teams sits at the top. Teams is how you create your SharePoint sites. Teams is where you start. When you create a team, it also creates groups within Outlook. Here's my Courseware cleanup group. Slowly but surely. Yes, yes, yes. Right, so this way the team has a calendar, so when you create a team, you create a SharePoint site. You create a team calendar. You create a team library. You create a team notebook. You create a team inbox. This is the team's inbox. You can email Courseware cleanup and it goes in here, so you could email sales support and it would go to the sales support team in their inbox where they have files and they have calendars and they have notebooks. So Teams would be where I would start or restart, and if you have existing SharePoint sites, you can link those to Teams, so you can use the existing sites, but use Teams for collaboration on those sites.
And getting your users to use it, like anything, it's change. It's different, but you'll have to create policies and procedures so that they start using Teams and stop sending attachments back and forth between each other. And at some point Skype for Business is gone, so at the end of August of this year Microsoft retired Skype for Business and Skype for Business is now Teams, so at some point your Skype for Business will not be available and you'll have to use Teams.