1. What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Teams compared to its competitors?
Harkirat Degun, Product Director at Resonate: “Microsoft Teams’ strength really lies with the fact that all the tools you need day to day are integrated into a single application.
“This includes not only the tried and tested Microsoft services but also offers support for third-party applications and solutions.
“With this single pane of glass approach and support for extensibility, it does put pressure on having a robust governance and adoption framework in place.
“In true agile fashion, there are plenty of new features being delivered every month but keeping on top of these without sufficient processes can become quite challenging.
“The best thing is that the service is included as part of all Microsoft 365 licenses which is commonplace in most enterprises, so you won’t be paying anything extra to have this great tool as part of your Unified Communication and Collaboration portfolio.”
Jamie Cole, UCaaS Proposition Manager at Gamma: “The great part of Teams is that it’s part of the M365 suite and therefore integrated with your productivity tools like Word and PowerPoint.
“It’s also very proven, it’s become the go-to for many companies’ hybrid working strategy, and Microsoft are continuously developing the product to improve the user experience, so if you choose to add voice to Teams, it is a relatively straightforward adoption story.
“It isn’t a completely new user interface for users to get their heads around, making it great for Information Workers. There are also multiple options for deploying Teams voice, giving customers choice but that can be confusing, so it’s important to understand each of them.
“The main con is that it is not the best fit in all scenarios for voice, especially if you simply need to make and receive calls from a shared handset it can become cost prohibitive.”
David Liu, CEO and Founder of Deltapath: “Teams is a great asset for communication and collaboration. Video meetings allow communication to flow more easily and give people the feeling of being in the same room when they may be on opposite sides of the world.
“Team members today are often dispersed across different geographical locations. The ability to share content with others during meetings increases engagement and comprehension. Teams, however, takes things a step further by allowing screen annotation with shared content.
“Annotations can help team members keep track of key ideas and questions. It also helps keep participants focused and engaged.
“One other plus is Teams ability to support third-party plugin to provide voice capabilities. As a result, companies do not have to get a Microsoft subscription that supports voice but can shop around.
“One of the downsides of Teams is that it is not supported on standard based H.323/SIP video conferencing systems.”
Lauren Brockman, Director of Product Management, UC at Bandwidth: “Bandwidth powers all the major platforms, so our goal is to enable telephony from whatever platform enterprises want to use. Each UCaaS platform has its own strengths, so it depends on what a specific company might need and the resources available.
“One of Microsoft’s biggest advantages is that it is designed as an open ecosystem, enabling the ability to plug in other vendors and services. With Teams, you get the best of what Microsoft has to offer with the additional bonus of a continual stream of innovation from players in the ecosystem.
“Microsoft also makes it easy to bring your own carrier (BYOC), as direct routing was a major consideration from the beginning, allowing for telecom carriers of choice to be accessible for enterprises.
“Teams also offers tighter integration between the Teams admin portal and the carriers through Operator Connect, so BYOC is user-experience friendly.”
Ryan Kahan, CEO of CallCabinet: "Microsoft Teams is easily the world’s leading unified communications (UC) platform. In Q1 2022, Teams had over 270 million users worldwide and was growing at a rate of nearly 50% over the previous year.
"Teams’ user-friendly interface and compatibility with both mobile and desktop devices has made it easy for many businesses to adopt the platform. This has helped thousands of enterprises offer remote work opportunities, which is vital for enterprises now competing globally for top talent in the workforce.
"However, Teams was built for collaboration, not compliance. It cannot record or store data in a manner compliant with most industry regulations, potentially exposing businesses and their customers to data security breaches, legal disputes, audits, and hefty regulatory non-compliance fines.
"Teams also lacks the ability to analyze voice data, preventing it from providing quality assurance or key business intelligence insights that will improve a business’ customer experience."
2. How should IT admins plan their migration process to Teams?
Harkirat Degun, Product Director at Resonate: “The migration process depends on what technology you are moving from. You will either be a greenfield organization, migrating from Skype for Business or migrating from a third-party UCC application.
“Each journey will have subtle differences such as defining a coexistence strategy for Skype for Business or Feature Mapping for third-party UCC applications. Planning is the key to success and key elements for all journeys are network assessment, governance, and adoption.
“You want to optimise your network and set out best practices for remote working to ensure a consistent user experience.
“Ensuring that you setup Teams in the right way and have processes in place to limit common challenges such as Team Sprawl, Guest Access & Data Leakage
“A focus on user adoption and training through initiatives such as champion networks and roadshows.
“Microsoft Partners, such as Resonate, can help you with all these planning and readiness requirements.”
Jamie Cole, UCaaS Proposition Manager at Gamma: “It depends on their starting point; many customers are now using teams for their internal communication and collaboration but have not extended it to Voice or using apps within Teams.
“It is always worth laying out a vision of what you’d like Teams to achieve for the organization. For example, is it simply a tool for meetings and chat or do you want to enable users for voice too?
“Once you have a vision, that will help outline the migration plan including which features and functionality to roll out first and then which to add in later. This will help to understand exactly which tasks need doing and how you want to do it.
“Often customers think about all the technology parts like policies and settings but overlook the adoption.
“Make sure to factor in training and getting executive sponsorship to help bring your people on the journey with you, to help them understand why Teams is being implemented in the business and what the benefits are to them.
David Liu, CEO and Founder of Deltapath: “Migrating your video conference platform to Teams is generally straightforward as Outlook calendar is natively integrated with Teams on Office 365.
“Companies will, however, need to plan audio dialling options. Additional costs may apply depending on the type of Office 365 subscription a company has.
“If a company has been using standards-based video conferencing systems in their meeting rooms, they will need to source a gateway service to help connect these devices to Teams meeting.
“Alternatively, companies can replace these devices with a microphone and camera kit for participants who can simply plug these accessories into their laptops.”
