Microsoft Teams holds a special position among the countless solutions that are making a name for themselves in the context of continued work from the home office. Whether a spontaneous move to the home office or the Brexit – scenarios that require an overnight migration never run smoothly. Even if the use of Microsoft Teams is very easy, things can go wrong with the unstructured introduction of a new tool.
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How To Get To A Team In Teams
By default, each user in teams initially has the option of creating a new team. And he usually does Without further ado, everyone starts to create teams for all sorts of reasons. Most teams end up with only one user, for example, because they were created for testing purposes.
Thomas Gloeckner, a software developer at Layer2, explains the background. In theory, it is possible to create up to 500,000 teams in a single-tenant, i.e. the environment of a single organization. For example, we have a customer who had over 700 teams in the background with a correspondingly confusing SharePoint situation at the start of the project. What some may not know. Behind each team is a SharePoint page with all of the associated resources. There is a danger that there will be a senseless document filing unnoticed, in which nothing can be found.
The provider Panopto found in a 2018 study that large US companies lose $ 47 million through poor knowledge management because employees spend an average of 5.3 hours a week waiting for information or reproducing existing results. This often leads to frustration and falling motivation.
Layer2 sales manager Clemens Streit knows from everyday practice Microsoft Teams has already established itself as the primary tool for internal communication in many companies. But everyone knows this one drawer into which we throw everything unsorted and find nothing if no system has been agreed. In many companies on the market, Microsoft Teams is used somewhat chaotically, because there are often no clear rules, conventions, and administrative tools for team and channel creation, project structures, document storage, authorizations, communication behavior, etc.
LinkUp Cube Collaboration Teams & SharePoint Jungle
This is exactly where Layer2’s LinkUp Cube Collaboration prevents, which automates the flexible migration of unstructured old data – whether locally or in the cloud – to a new, tidy SharePoint environment and enables central, simplified management of teams beyond the standard. SharePoint serves as a central intranet from which all relevant elements of daily work can be reached. Thanks to the seamless integration with teams, employees can communicate in multimedia and work together on projects.
Teams lifecycle Management
The keyword for efficient team management is Teams Lifecycle Management. Each project-related team follows a certain life cycle, from the foundation at the start of a project, through the duration of the project to the completion and the provision of important results afterward. The LinkUp Cube manages exactly this life cycle by standardizing the channel structure and the design of the SharePoint page. This will introduce a structured process for creating, managing, and archiving teams. The environment has been tidy from the start and remains so.
The LinkUp Cube Collaboration In Use At Innogy Consulting
Due to its extensive technical expertise, the management consultancy Innogy Consulting decided to support Layer2 as a partner when introducing Microsoft Teams. Based on decades of know-how from knowledge and document management, Innogy Consulting already had a proven structure for diverse projects. In the collaboration, Microsoft Teams should now be clearly and mapped from the start.
For the international consulting company Innogy Consulting, Layer2 introduced its LinkUp Cube Collaboration, which sensibly complements the Microsoft standard. As in any modern software project, the project approach relied on workshops in which possible solutions were presented and the requirements of Innogy Consulting were recorded.
Innogy Consulting, in particular, as an international consulting company, has a large number of projects running in parallel. The central challenge of the project was the mapping of the existing, library-like filing and the project-related indexing of documents to improve their findability.
Before the digital workspace was implemented, there was many different document storage and collaboration solutions side by side. In addition to the classic drive, some employees also used teams, but without a centralized approach and with only a few guidelines on how exactly the storage should work. For example, no metadata would have made a searching and sorting easier, nor was there a centrally controlled authorization concept that gave access to selected documents, comments Inga Schmidt, Head of Knowledge Management and Research at Innogy Consulting.
How Innogy Consulting Works With Teams
Teams have long developed into the central office app from Microsoft. With continuously added features, teams enable completely new possibilities for collaboration and can still be flexibly adapted to the changing requirements of a dynamic company.
This is mainly because we decided on a two-stage model for the introduction. We are aware that this new digital workplace not only brings about technical changes but also needs a complete mindshift concerning the general way of working, to be successful. Only when our consultants have made use of teams for project work a matter, of course, can the integration of partners and customers work seamlessly.
As always, such a project is just the beginning, Inga Schmidt knows We are currently considering the introduction of an approval process for the creation of teams, which could be mapped via Flow from the Microsoft Power platform. Thomas Gloeckner from Layer2 confirms. In principle, the LinkUp Cube can be expanded as desired, using elements of the Microsoft technology stack or, without any problems, solutions from third-party providers.
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