Does Your Microsoft Teams Deployment Spark Joy?

By Craig Yellick – VP Business Solutions

Get a Fresh Start with Microsoft Teams

Back in early 2020 when the pandemic jump-started the massive work from home/work remotely movement, many organizations embraced Microsoft Teams as a great way to keep people communicating and collaborating no matter where they might be.  Microsoft reports Teams deployments increased by over 70% to 75 million daily active users in just a few short months.

Is there a downside to such rapid adoption? At Blue Net, we are hearing some grumbling about out-of-control deployments with too many teams, too many channels, confusing names, complicated membership and security. This creates a frustrating situation ripe for duplicate files and messages because people cannot find important information among all the potential places it may end up, along with missed messages and opportunities to participate and collaborate.

Out-of-the-box, the best you can do is some renaming of teams and channels. There are no options for reorganizing and simplifying things. If you hide teams and channels the content still shows up in searches, and notifications are still sent. While you can delete channels or even entire teams, you lose the content and messages. Files from deleted channels are preserved in SharePoint, but you must manually transfer them to a new location.

If your Teams is not sparking joy amongst your staff, all is not lost! Here at Blue Net, we work with many clients relying on Teams and SharePoint and the other products that make up Office 365. We have seen it all, from wonderfully well-designed solutions to utter chaos, end everything in between. We can help redesign your team, channel and membership strategy to better fit your needs and delight your users.

Additionally, due to the volume of work we do with Office 365, we can justify an investment in power tools that allow us to more efficiently and effectively migrate and maintain content, while retaining permissions. Some key capabilities we offer include:

• Migrate channels between teams.
• Merge two or more channels into a single channel.
• Copy teams and channels if you want to use a template approach, or for archiving.
• Identify orphaned or inactive teams and channels.
• Migrate teams across tenants in support of mergers and acquisitions.
• Migrate files from a local file server to SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive.
• Migrate files and content in and out of SharePoint and Teams.
• Schedule migration activities off-hours to avoid disruption.

Let Blue Net help you spark some joy with our Microsoft Teams Make Over Session! Call today for a free assessment.