Ben Love [00:00:01]:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to our webinar today on a deep dive into Microsoft Teams. My name is Ben Love. I’m the managing director of grassroots it, and I’ll be taking you through our session this morning. So just a quick look at what’s on our agenda for today’s webinar. First of all, we’re going to touch on the topic of what is Microsoft Teams? Now, I’m not going to spend too long on that particular point because I think everybody in attendance here today really has some idea of what Microsoft Teams is. I think probably the more interesting question for us to spend our time on is how can we use Microsoft Teams better? What can Microsoft Teams bring to my business? Is it even worth me using Microsoft Teams? So why should your business use Microsoft Teams? Is really the question we’re going to be addressing here today. And the way we’re going to do that is by stepping through some real world use cases of Microsoft Teams, specifically here within grassroots it, and how we use Microsoft Teams ourselves. Now, if you have any questions as we go through here, there is A-Q-A button in the webinar software.

Ben Love [00:01:27]:
So I would encourage you to please put your questions in there. We do have a couple of members of my team who are monitoring those Q as, and we will either address them real time through that chat window, that Q a window, or we will loop back to them at the end if we have time, just a quick one on grassroots it and who we are. We are a managed it services provider. We provide it services, help desk support network, eproject, all that sort of stuff there. We are very heavy on the Microsoft stack. So the Microsoft cloud environment offers three, six five and Microsoft three six five. Actually these days is a large part of how we spend our time. We have been going since 2005, so we’ve been around for a little while.

Ben Love [00:02:13]:
We have seen the changes in the industry, and we are now currently really enjoying this new cloud world that we’re well and truly part of. Our mission here is to deliver solutions that drive change. Now, this is very important. What we’re looking to do here is to offer you some ideas, some inspiration about how you can drive the change in your business that’s important for you, that’s important for you to achieve your organization’s mission. And very importantly, in the context of what we’re discussing today, grassroots, it is a very diverse team across three countries. We’ve got our head office in Brisbane. We have got a team in Auckland, in New Zealand, and we have got a team in Clark, in the Philippines. In addition to that, we almost always have people who are not office based who are working remotely.

Ben Love [00:03:06]:
We have a fairly flexible work policy for working from home. We also frequently work from client locations, whether we’re delivering projects, helping them with their it roadmapping and planning and budgeting, et cetera. We’ll often be on site with our clients there. So when it comes to this product of Microsoft Teams that we’re going to be diving into today, in this world of remote working, of working with team members across multiple geographies, locations, et cetera, we very much eat our own dog food, as the saying goes, in our industry at least. So we actually walk the talk with this and we live this every day. So what is Microsoft Teams? Look, if you were to ask a lot of people what Microsoft Teams is, their initial immediate response would be that it is a chat tool where you can type chat messages back and forth. In that definition, it is very similar to other tools on the market such as slack or hip chat, where you just type these messages to one or more people on your team. You can copy and paste in maybe some links or some files, et cetera.

Ben Love [00:04:22]:
And that’s really it. Now look, Microsoft Teams does have chat functionality and in fact it’s a very core feature, a very core part of what Microsoft Teams is. However, Microsoft Teams is a lot more than that. And this is the really important thing that I need you to leave today’s webinar understanding, understanding all of the other stuff that Microsoft Teams has sitting there waiting for you to start using. So I want you to start thinking about Microsoft Teams as a one stop hub for all of your teamwork and collaboration. Okay? And we will expand on that a little bit more as we go. Probably a key point too here is that Microsoft Teams is really built for teamwork and collaboration. So if you are a one person business, you may not get all of this value out of the product.

Ben Love [00:05:16]:
It really is designed for multiple people working on common information and common, I guess, common tasks and duties and so on so that we can collaborate there. So why Microsoft Teams? There are four key points that I’d like to touch on here. The first key point is security, the Microsoft cloud environment as a whole. So by that I mean Microsoft Office, three, six, five, Microsoft Azure and all of the products and services and workloads that fit within that of which teams is one is built from the ground up, with security baked in to its very essence, if you will. Microsoft continue to spend billions of dollars on building secure products and on making sure that they stay secure. So by using these Microsoft cloud solutions and Office 365 solutions, your technology, your data, your information is going to be more secure than it would be if you had a server sitting in your own office. Collaboration is the next point here. I’ve already touched on that briefly.

Ben Love [00:06:33]:
The real power of Microsoft Teams is enabling the people in your business to collaborate, to work together, to access core information, et cetera. It’s a fundamental reason for Teams’existence apps integration. This comes into the discussion about how Microsoft Teams really can perform as the hub of your workday. We can actually plug in, if you will, other applications into Teams. Now, we can plug in a lot of the Microsoft office stack, obviously, but we can also plug in third party apps and bring them in as an integral part of Microsoft Teams. And again, we will touch on that a little bit more later. And the last point we have here about why Microsoft Teams is the adaptability. This is one of the fundamental strengths of the tool in that you can shape this tool to suit your business and how your business works and what the key points are that you’re looking to address by adopting Microsoft Teams.

Ben Love [00:07:43]:
Now, again, we will go into that a little bit further and the best way to do that is to explore how grassroots it uses teams. Now, before I get started on this little bit of background here, I’ve already told you about grassroots it, how we’ve got a very diverse workforce across three countries. We have gone through the journey over the years ourselves of working out how best to do that, how best to operate with staff in different locations, how to bring everyone onto the same team irrespective of geography. We have used various tools over the years. We have used the hip chats and the slacks and the Skype for businesses and all these things over the years. Hands down, the best of all of these solutions that we have ever used is Microsoft Teams. Today, teams is a fundamental part of how we operate our business and I’ve struggled to see how we would do without it, to be honest. So let’s dive in now.

Ben Love [00:08:50]:
Chat, I started with this. So when we talk about chat, we are really talking about a private messaging. So typing here, text based messaging, if you will, between two or more team members. Now, this is something that everybody in the audience will be very familiar with. It’s a paradigm, a method of communication that’s existed for a long time. There is nothing new or revolutionary within teams about how it works. Okay, so I’m not going to dwell on that particular one there. Suffice to say, you can type messages, you can paste in videos of cute little pugs on swings.

Ben Love [00:09:25]:
You can share files, you can do these things. But let’s take it the next step further. Microsoft Teams, at the click of a button, can move from a chat to a one on one video or audio call. So we use this intensely within grassroots it. Given that we are spread across three countries, we in fact are very, very intentional about making sure that we do operate as one team. And we’ve found that one of the best ways to do that is to use video a lot. So we are very intentional about having a video call with our colleagues at least once a day, where we can default to video instead of just a voice call, we do so where it’s appropriate to use a video call instead of an email or a text message, we do so. And it makes a significant difference with how our staff relate to each other, understand, communicate, the clarity of the communication.

Ben Love [00:10:24]:
Because as we all know, when you can see somebody’s face, you get the nuance. You get far more from that communication than simply maybe the written word. You can see the pauses, the eyes rolling, as sometimes happens, et cetera. Now, a couple of acute things within teams when it comes to these video calls, you will note the blurred background. Now, at first I thought this is going to be a bit gimmicky, but the fact of the matter is, it can actually be pretty useful, particularly when you’re working from home. So for all of those who have worked from home at some stage, and we have been asked to get on a video call, your first thought goes to struth. What’s behind me? How messy is this room that I’m sitting in? What is that going to look like to my colleagues on the other end of this video call, Microsoft Teams has got this cute little feature. You click a button and it just automatically blurs the background.

Ben Love [00:11:14]:
Now, the next step on that, which has apparently been released, but I haven’t seen it come through into our tenant yet, is you can actually put your own custom virtual backgrounds on that, similar to a green screen that they use in movies and film and so on. So essentially project, if you will, some artificial background on there. So you could picture, this is MC, by the way. This is MC from our marketing team there. And that’s Annie down in the bottom corner. But if you could picture MC there, maybe sitting on a beach having this video call, maybe with the millennium Falcon in the background there with a warp field behind her or something, that’s the sort of fun stuff you could do around that. Now, the next step beyond one on one video calls is meetings or teams meetings if you will. So really what we’re doing here is we’re just stepping up.

Ben Love [00:12:05]:
Instead of a one to one video call here, we’re stepping up into a many to many video call, a video conference if you will. Now these are super easy to coordinate and to arrange in Microsoft Teams, plain and simple. You go to your calendar in Outlook the same way and create a new meeting the same way you would for any other meeting in Microsoft Outlook. But you will notice that there will be a team, sorry, a button at the top that says teams meeting. You click on that and it will tell the system that you actually want this meeting to be a meeting within Microsoft Teams. It will do all sorts of magic behind the scenes. It will invite the relevant people who you put in the required and optional fields there, the same way you would any other calendar invite. And it will put a link into that meeting there.

Ben Love [00:12:53]:
When the time comes for the meeting, all your attendees need to do is click on the link or click on the button that’s presented and they will be automatically joined into your team meeting. Very, very easy to use and organize for all parties concerned. Now this is something that we use on a regular basis here at grassroots it. For example, every time we have a new staff member join the team here, we will do a full team welcome call where every member of our team gets on to a video meeting just like you can see on your screen here. And we will go around the room, the virtual room, and everybody will spend 60 seconds introducing themselves. Hello, my name is Ben. I’m the managing director here at grassroots it. I really look forward to working with you.

Ben Love [00:13:40]:
If you’ve got any questions about anything, HR, finance, whatever related or any concerns at any stage, please, I’m always here for you. And we go around the room just introducing ourselves and how we fit into the organization. And that includes the new person as well. Obviously they introduce themselves to the team. We schedule our regular catch up meetings using this method here with these video conference calls. We do this not only internally, just with our own staff, but with external parties as well. We use these meetings regularly with our clients and with our suppliers. It is a very, very powerful way of having those interactions there when you have the video and the voice going, so short of taking a couple of hours out of your day and driving to someone else’s office, this is a fantastic way of engaging with all of those people.

Ben Love [00:14:34]:
We also conduct a lot of internal training here and so those training sessions are run over. A Microsoft Teams meeting, it would be very similar to a webinar, if you will. Similar to what we’re doing here, except there would be two way interaction between the attendees and the person who is delivering this internal training. And those training sessions there. There can be deeper, more involved ones, or we can have little 1520 minutes lunch and learn sessions there, which are very popular as well. So when one of our team pick up on a great new idea or a new technology they’ve learned something about, we can run these short, sharp internal training sessions. Now, one of the great features of running your meetings within teams like that, like this, is that the meetings can be recorded at the click of a button, so that recording will record the video and the audio, et cetera. And that recording can be automatically saved into what’s called Microsoft Stream.

Ben Love [00:15:35]:
Okay, put a pin in that. We will touch on Microsoft stream shortly. Okay, now let’s move on to the topic of teams within Microsoft Teams. This is where Microsoft’s naming schema can get a little bit of a tongue twister. Within the product called teams, you can create teams. So a team is a shared space for specific projects, departments or topics. Now, if you remember right back at the beginning, I used the word adaptability. This is where the adaptability of Microsoft Teams really starts to shine through, because you can shape it to suit your organization and where you will get the most benefit from.

Ben Love [00:16:28]:
Now, I will walk you through a couple of examples of how you can use teams to drive that collaboration and sharing. One way of configuring a team is to create a team around a particular department within your business. So, for example, on the screenshot here, we are looking at the sales and marketing team. So this is a team that we’ve created and we have invited specific people from our business to be members of that team. Now, MC and Annie are obviously in there because they’re our core marketing team. But we also have David as a member of that marketing team there because David is often involved in helping prepare content, some subject matter expertise in putting together webinars, for example, or blog posts or white papers or whatever they may be working on. So you might also have a team built around maybe your finance team or your operations and service delivery. So you can really align the teams, if you like, to that organizational structure.

Ben Love [00:17:39]:
But of course, that’s only one way that you could shape a team. Another way to shape a team is around a project. Now, a project can be thought of as a particular set of activities with a defined outcome. So your projects obviously might be long term or might be short term. The particular project team that we’re looking at here in this screenshot is our cybersecurity office. Now our cybersecurity office here. Think of it more as a working group if you will, or a committee. So it’s a small working group here within grassroots.

Ben Love [00:18:15]:
It we convene once a week and we discuss all things cybersecurity. We review grassroots, it’s own security stance, and we keep progressing that forward over time to ensure that we’re always current and we’re as secure as we can be. We also have discussions around our clients cybersecurity and how we can better help in that area there. But this particular team here, as you’ll see, is just around that cybersecurity office. So this is where we can keep all of our discussions, our chats, our files and so on that relates to that particular project based activity. Now I will just draw your attention at this point in time too to the very top of the chat window there, and you will see some little words. It’s a menu, if you will, but a horizontal one that says posts files essential eight alignment notebook. Now I just want you to notice that that is there.

Ben Love [00:19:10]:
We will move on to that shortly. But that is quite important as to how teams can be extensible. And another example of how you could shape a team within teams is around a specific topic. So we have some core values within our organization here and one of those core values is we are masters of our craft. Now that particular value speaks to our technical expertise. So what we have here is a team that has been created and the team is called masters of our craft. And you’ll notice specifically too, within that team we have different channels. There is the general one, but there’s also MD 100 and MS 900 is the one that we’re highlighted on the moment.

Ben Love [00:19:59]:
Now to explain that a little bit, MS 900 is the name of a very specific Microsoft certification. So what we see here is that we’ve got some of our team who have been studying the MS 900 certification and working towards the exam and getting certified on that particular subject. So they’ve created this channel here where they are sharing information, sharing study tips, sharing practice exams that they may have sourced from somewhere and really supporting each other in those activities. Now this is obviously a team that’s built around that particular topic. So I hope that’s given you some ideas of how you can shape your teams to best suit your organization. Another really good example actually around topics that I should put in here is we have a specific channel within teams, which is for p one incidents. And by that I mean priority one. So whenever we have on our service desk, whenever we have a client who suffers from a priority one incident, so that’s the entire network down or a potential security breach, something of that sort there, the p one channel lights up, and that’s what we use exclusively for communications regarding that p one, we have defined incident plans around these things, and that is all brought into play and communicated across the team in that p one channel to keep everybody on exactly the same page in real time about how and what is being done to respond to that incident.

Ben Love [00:21:37]:
Now, you’ll recall a couple of minutes ago I asked you to take note of the horizontal menu that it was at the top of the screen there, or tabs, as they’re sometimes referred to. Tabs are where we can start to integrate other applications into Microsoft Teams. Now, you can integrate both Office three, six, five apps, as well as third party apps. So what we see on the screen here is an example of the window where you can choose which app you want to integrate. So we can see some of the usual suspects here. We’ve got Microsoft Excel, for example, or Onenote Sharepoint. But you’ll note that we’ve also got Trello. And you’ll note that as we, if we were to scroll further down there, there are dozens and dozens and probably hundreds of these things, to be honest, that you can embed within teams.

Ben Love [00:22:34]:
So it’s not just other Microsoft software that you can embed here, but third party services as well. So let’s have a look at some of those examples and specifically how we use these within grassroots it. One of the most common ones is to embed a document library within a particular team. Here at grassroots it, we no longer use a file server. We no longer have a shared drive, the G drive that you might be familiar with. It’s a shared folder off the server where you stick all your files. We don’t have one of those anymore. All of our files are now held within document libraries, within teams.

Ben Love [00:23:18]:
So specifically what we’re looking at in this screenshot here is the sales and marketing team, which we touched on earlier, and the marketing channel, but specifically a document library which is marketing documents. So this is for all types of documents and files that our marketing team use. There’s going to be PowerPoint presentations and photographs and jpegs and Word documents and pdfs, and all of the sort of stuff that you’re likely to accumulate held here within a document library. Now, these document libraries are set up per team. So what this means is that anybody in our organization who is not a member of the sales and marketing team will not have access to this document library into these files and folders. Now with sales and marketing, it’s probably less of an issue. But if you take that out and you think about if you’ve got a team set up, for example, for the board or for your executive management or for your finance department, then you want to make sure those files and those chats and those videos and all those things there secure to just the members of that team. Now that security and that functionality is simply baked in.

Ben Love [00:24:32]:
If you do not invite somebody into a particular team, they will not be able to access that team and they will not be able to access any of the content which is stored within that particular team. Now the other thing about document libraries is that behind the scenes there, we’re actually using a SharePoint document library. So for those of you familiar with Sharepoint document libraries, the functionality is pretty much all there. So that means that you can share these files, we can look at version control and tracking. We can do all this sort of good stuff that we can do with SharePoint document libraries as well. Microsoft Planner for those of you not familiar with Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Planner is part of Office three, six, five. If you have Office three, six, five at the moment, you will already have access to planner. It’s already there.

Ben Love [00:25:20]:
You just need to go and start using it. And it is a task management and I guess a very small scale project management tool. So it’s very similar to Trello for those people who’ve used Trello. And it’s based on the Kanban principle of work management. So essentially you have buckets or lists, and in those buckets you have different tasks. A task can be assigned to a person and it can have notes and images and files added to a particular task, and you just drag and drop stuff around the place. It’s a great little tool. So our marketing team here use planner a lot.

Ben Love [00:26:00]:
They in fact run their entire workload from planner. And as you can see from the screenshot, it’s embedded directly into teams. So they don’t need to leave teams. They simply click on the tab at the top there that says planner. And they are straight into that planner where they manage all of their campaigns, their content creation, their webinars, you name it. Very, very powerful tool for keeping everybody on the same page. Now, I should just mention here, this example here uses Microsoft Planner. And as I said, if you’ve got Office 365, which you will have, if you’ve got teams.

Ben Love [00:26:38]:
You will already have planner, but let’s just say you’re a Trello shop, so you’ve already committed to using Trello, which does a very, very similar thing. That’s okay. We can embed Trello in there just the same way that we do. Planner, stream video library. Okay, I wish I could get a show of hands here. Who even knows what stream is? Because I think it’s one of those ones that flies under the radar a bit, to be honest. So stream again comes with Office three, six, five. It’s a video library, so think of it as maybe a secure and private YouTube just for your organization.

Ben Love [00:27:19]:
You can upload videos into stream, you can assign them to channels, your people can search and browse and do all that sort of stuff. It’s got some really funky features these days, too. It can do automatic transcription, so it will automatically listen to the words being spoken in the video and type out in text what is being said. Very powerful feature there for being able to search for the content within videos and not just the title of a video, for example. So we use video, as I’ve already said a lot, for things like training, internal training sessions. Well, we record all of those internal training sessions and those recordings automatically get saved up into our stream video library. And that stream video library is then embedded here within teams. So essentially what we have here within the relevant team, again, we’re still in the sales and marketing one, actually, you’d almost think the sales and marketing people would put together this slide deck, wouldn’t you? And what we’re seeing here is within this marketing team, we’re seeing the marketing team’s own video library, which has got all of their training videos about how to use particular tools or what the methodology is behind how we, I don’t know, the language that we use behind a particular blog post or whatever the topic may be.

Ben Love [00:28:46]:
And so at a couple of clicks, the marketing team have direct access to these videos and they can click on them and instantly stream them down to whatever device they are using at the time. That might be their laptop, it might be a mobile device like a phone. Onenote. Onenote’s a funny thing. People either love it or hate it. It’s quite a divisive little product I’ve found. OneNote, for those who are not aware, is an application. It’s a bit of software, part of the Microsoft Office suite, I guess, but it’s all there within Office 365 and it allows you to create unstructured documents.

Ben Love [00:29:29]:
So it uses the concept of a notebook and within a notebook you then have sections and pages, and on a page you put whatever you want. So you might stick some photographs in there, or a link to another web page, or a PDF file. You can type text in, you can draw, if you’ve got a touch enabled device, you can draw on the Onenote screen if you like, taking handwritten notes, all sorts of magic, stuff like that. So we use Onenote to manage our meetings internally here. So in our screenshot here, we’re looking down at our cybersecurity office team, our CSO team, and specifically we’re looking at the tab along the top, which is called notebook, and in there you can see that we’ve got sections for our meeting minutes. So every time we sit down for a meeting, we create a new page with the date and someone types in the meeting minutes. We have got a page we’re looking at here actually, which is for next meeting agenda. So anybody can just dump ideas on this, topics on this that they would like to raise at an upcoming meeting.

Ben Love [00:30:36]:
And of course, because this is all embedded within teams, because this has all got the Microsoft cloud behind it, all of this synchronizes in real time for everybody who’s got access to this particular team. So that means that everybody sitting around the table at that point in time can see the minutes being typed out in real time if they wanted to watch them. And anybody can access these minutes, these agenda items, et cetera, at any point in between meetings. And it’s all there held within the CSO team. Excel spreadsheets, we still use them a lot, don’t we? They’re very powerful. So why would you want to use an Excel spreadsheet within teams? Super question, and I can give you a super example of how we use an Excel spreadsheet embedded directly within teams. In summary, we’re using it as a dashboard. So what we’re looking at here again in the CSO team is an Excel spreadsheet that is embedded within that team, and it’s for the essential eight alignment.

Ben Love [00:31:44]:
So for those of you who are not aware, the essential eight is a framework developed by the australian government that you can use to assess your cybersecurity stance and to help drive best practice in regards to cybersecurity for your business. So what we’re using here is an Excel spreadsheet as a dashboard to really identify all of the different controls within the essential eight and then rate grassroots it on how we are stacking up against each of those controls using a traffic light dashboard system. Green is good, red is bad, that sort of thing. So in your own business, are there opportunities for you to present an Excel spreadsheet here? You could use it as a dashboard like this. Maybe there’s something else that you use an Excel spreadsheet for. You might have an Excel spreadsheet which provides sales figures, real time reporting out of one of your line of business applications as to how many coffees and appointments and leads your sales team is working at the moment. Well, you could just embed that spreadsheet here so that it’s available as a dashboard for anybody to see at any point in time. Automation and alerting so this is an example of how grassroots it uses teams to really draw immediate and urgent attention to high priority issues.

Ben Love [00:33:11]:
The example we’re seeing here is an automated alert that comes out of our helpdesk ticketing system. So when our help desk ticket queue becomes too long, system automatically drops one of these alerts into one of our other technical teams, specifically the NOC team. And the message basically says, hey guys, the help desk team is really under the pump at the moment. Could you come across and lend a hand? Because our NOC team do very important work, but it’s often not as time critical as the help desk. So this alert here happens automatically. And as soon as the NOC team see that alert drop into their chat window there, they know that they’re needed over there so they can try and wrap up what they’re working on and then give the help desk team a hand. Now you might not run a ticketing system in your business, but for example, you may want to pay close attention to mentions of your organization on social media. So when your business is mentioned on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever your social platform of choice is, well, maybe you could set up some automation so that whenever your business is mentioned, boom, it just drops a little notification just like this, straight into a team’s chat window and brings it front and center.

Ben Love [00:34:33]:
For those people who need to know, that has just happened. So there are numerous ways in which you can use this functionality here. And really, the sky is the limit. So have a think about what information, what real time alerting or notifications might be useful for your team. And maybe we can explore ways in which we can bring those notifications into a teams channel for you so that we bring them front and center. One of my favorite parts about Microsoft Teams is that there is a Teams mobile app. Now, of course, everything has an app these days, and teams is no different. The Teams app is actually incredibly good.

Ben Love [00:35:22]:
And given how mobile. Most of my workforce is at least and probably yours. This is a very useful tool for us. Most of what you can do in teams on the desktop, on a computer, you can actually do in the mobile app these days as well. It’s very, very good. So some examples of how we use the mobile app for teams. We are constantly doing the text chat with each other. So instead of sending a text message or an imessage or whatever, we will do a lot of that type of chatting.

Ben Love [00:35:59]:
Now, within teams on the mobile device, obviously we use teams on the mobile for voice calls, especially the international ones. So if I need to speak to Craig, for example, in Auckland, and I am out and about, then rather than making a mobile telephone call to Craig and obviously international call rates, et cetera, I will simply use my mobile phone but make it a teams call instead. Now, it can be audio only. I can hold the phone up to my ear just like it’s a normal phone call, but it’s going via the Internet, so works very well, obviously, and there are none of those international call charges. Now, the Teams mobile app is also extremely good for the video conferencing piece of it. You can participate very actively in a team’s video meeting using the mobile app here. In fact, we even have a great story that one of the guys tells about how he was meant to be in, at a client site in the city here in Brisbane to participate in a team’s video call. But he was in the Uber from our office heading into the city and got held up in traffic and he was going to be late for the call.

Ben Love [00:37:23]:
So he started that call from his mobile device. So he was sitting in the back of the Uber, he had his mobile phone, he had his headphones plugged in, and he was actively participating in that team’s video meeting. He kept actively participating in that team’s video meeting all the way in the Uber to the city, out of the Uber, into the building, up the elevator, into the client’s office, into the meeting room where the meeting was actually happening, to the point at which he then disconnected his mobile phone and sat down at the boardroom table and was part of the meeting still. So that connectivity and that handoff happened seamlessly there. And that was wonderful because he didn’t actually have to miss that meeting after all, despite the traffic being a bit of a nightmare. Teams voice calling. Now you can make a voice call from one team’s user to another team’s user straight off the bat, as I’ve said a number of times already, that functionality is just pretty cool. What you can also do with Teams though is use it to replace your phone system, your normal traditional phone system.

Ben Love [00:38:30]:
So you might have a PBX phone system still in the office there. You might have a VoIP system, a cloud PBX solution. Whatever the case may be, you can actually bring all of that functionality into Teams so that your staff can then start to use Microsoft Teams to make normal phone calls, phone calls out to other people who aren’t on teams. Now this is a little bit of an advanced use case at this point in time. It does work, but there are some limitations on how that can work. But it is quite an interesting area to watch. So we’ve just covered a whole heap of real world use cases of how grassroots it uses Microsoft Teams every day, and I really, really hope we’ve given you some good ideas and some inspiration for how you can start thinking about using Microsoft Teams within your organization. But if you’re going to be adopting Microsoft Teams, going to be adopting any new tool or process or methodology, you want that to be a successful adoption, don’t you? So consider these questions.

Ben Love [00:39:41]:
What benefit does a new it system deliver if no one uses it? What benefits does an optimized business process deliver if people don’t adopt it? And what benefits are achieved if a restructure doesn’t change the way people collaborate and break down the silos? The obvious answer is none, with a large negative return on investment. So if you look at bringing Microsoft Teams into your business, a crucial part of that discussion is the change management is how do we guide the organization from the point where they don’t have teams and aren’t using teams to the point where they are in a successful way so that we get the most out of the tool, the most out of the implementation there. That change management piece is not an optional extra, it’s a key component of any project like this. So I really would encourage you to think about how you’re going to best drive this adoption within your organization. Here are some quick tips on how you can make that happen. Firstly, define a vision and identify how teams will be used. Now, we’ve already given you some ideas so far in this webinar. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of ideas bubbling away yourself at the moment, and obviously we can help with those conversations if you would like, obtain proactive support from senior leadership to encourage the use of teams.

Ben Love [00:41:12]:
This is critical to any change management program. You must have that senior level buy in and the senior level must be actively demonstrating their commitment and their buy in to whatever the initiative is that you’re looking to adopt. You need to provide training for end users. If people don’t know how to use a tool, they won’t use the tool. Or maybe they’ll use it, but use it incorrectly. So providing training for end users is really, really important. And it doesn’t have to be complicated or hard or expensive at all. Again, we can help you with that and raising awareness through the internal communications Pete’s there a lot of different mediums that that can go on the email, intranet videos and newsletters and so on, but however you choose to do it, however your organization best communicates internally, raising that awareness of the initiative and maintaining that awareness is very, very important.

Ben Love [00:42:12]:
And of course, any change management program will need to link the project level activities with the individual activities. So we have just covered a huge amount in that webinar there. I flew through a lot of that content. I understand, but I really do hope I’ve given you some good ideas around how Microsoft Teams could be used within your organization. I really do hope I’ve prompted you to think about the importance of change management and driving that adoption of user training to make sure that is handled as effectively as possible. And of course, grassroots, it can help with all of these things. So if you would like any discussions around any of those areas there, then please reach out. You know where to find us.

Ben Love [00:43:02]:
So I would encourage anybody to put questions that you have into the Q and a window within the webinar software here. I do have a couple of questions already, and we’re up to about the 45 minutes mark, so I do have time to answer some of these questions. So, Jeff, can a sharepoint document library be set as read only by default and writable only for defined users? That is a super question, and I am going to get back to you on that one, Jeff, if that’s all right. Getting down into those really nuanced permissions on these things, I just don’t want to answer if I’m going to give you the wrong answer. So I’m actually just going to ask my team who are helping here to just flag that question and we will get back to you on that one, Jeff. Kylie, this is fantastic. Thanks. What are connectors in a channel used for? Yeah, great question.

Ben Love [00:44:06]:
So a connector in a channel is the piece that lets you link some sort of external or third party service, if you will, into that channel. So, for example, within grassroots it, we use Microsoft Yammer quite a lot. Yammer is like, look, think of it as Facebook, but kind of an internal corporate version of know less cats and fake news and so on. We have a connector configured, or let me say another way around. Whenever a new post goes into Yammer using a connector, we have that post also appear within our Microsoft Teams channel so that our staff just get that little extra notification that, oh, there’s a new Yammer post. I’m going to go over there and read all the details about it. And that actually works really well. It really drives awareness of what’s happening over there on Yammer.

Ben Love [00:45:02]:
Amit, how are you? Amit, your question, are you suggesting that teams plus sharepoint database could potentially replace our document management software Dropbox? Amit, I’m going to give you a very short answer, and the answer is yes. I absolutely think that you could replace Dropbox. Obviously, there may be a bit of discussion about if you’re using Dropbox in any particularly unique ways, how we would shape that, et cetera. But look, the short answer is yes. We have seen numerous people retire Dropbox in favor of SharePoint and OneDrive and Teams and the Microsoft stack there. So, yes, absolutely. Lisa, how are you? Lisa, if we embed non Microsoft apps like Trello in teams, does it then make the data in Trello secure? Yeah, interesting question, Lisa. I would like to think that your data in Trello was already secure but secured by Trello.

Ben Love [00:46:08]:
Obviously your Trello data will continue to exist within Trello. Your Trello data is not migrated across into the Microsoft platform in any way. We are simply embedding the Trello application within the Microsoft Teams hub. I hope that answers your question. I’m not sure if I got that quite right. But Lisa, if that doesn’t answer your question, please reach out to me after this and I’ll absolutely discuss that with you a bit further. Caleb hi, Caleb. Hi, Ben.

Ben Love [00:46:45]:
Can you please explain how conference calling works in teams? Absolutely. So if you want to do a multi person conference call or a video call or whatever within teams, there are two ways to do it. As I said in your outlook calendar, you can create a new meeting just as you normally would, but click on the teams meeting button and it will magically turn it into a teams meeting. And then you obviously invite the relevant people and set a date and time and so on. The other way is you can configure those. You can create those teams meetings directly within teams if you want. Again, there’s just a little button there which is called meetings from memory and you just create it directly in there. So very easy to use when the time comes for your meeting, all of your attendees simply click on the relevant button within teams or within the outlook calendar invite and they will be automatically joined into that conference.

Ben Love [00:47:42]:
Caleb, I hope that answers that question. Please let me know if I’ve missed the mark as well. Caleb, again, sorry, I just saw this follow up in particular, how to call one person and then add another. Oh, my apologies. Okay, so Caleb’s just expanded on his conference calling question there and added in particular, how do you call one person and then add another person to the call? Caleb, there is simply a button. So if you’re in the middle of a video call or teams call with one person, there is simply a button on the side of the screen there that you can click to add another attendee, another member directly into that call and it will then ring them and they answer and they will then become part of that call. All right, bear with me. Lisa, I’d love if you could please share the answer to Jeff’s question with me too, Lisa.

Ben Love [00:48:34]:
I hope I will make a note of that, Lisa, and get back to you on that. Carly, thanks. And why not add it in where you added in planner? Carly, I apologize. I’m not sure what you’re referring to there. And Jeff, hello again, Jeff. We’ve started using teams for client projects. Fantastic. And some internal functions.

Ben Love [00:49:00]:
I find sometimes the structure of the teams and channels needs to change. So move a channel to a different team. This can be done for files but not for posts and other apps. This current limitation highlights the importance of getting the design right and perhaps as a general guide to limit the total number of teams set up. Jeff, fantastic points there and I absolutely understand and I absolutely agree. This comes with the, I guess, your familiarity with Microsoft Teams and how best to design the team and channel structure within that. I know we have certainly evolved our design within grassroots it over time. Some of the early teams and channels we used no longer exist and we’ve created new ones.

Ben Love [00:49:47]:
We are pretty stable now. Interestingly enough, with the teams and channels that we have set up, we do continue to explore ways to use it and we’ve got some new ideas which we’re discussing at the moment. But yeah, I absolutely agree with what you’re saying there, Jeff. But again, that’s a good opportunity for sort of more discussion and learning as you go, of course, isn’t it? And Kylie, you mentioned connectors again. Kylie, I’m sorry, I’m not sure specifically what you’re asking there. Bear with me. I’ve just found some people using the chat window here as well. Bear with me, Jeff.

Ben Love [00:50:26]:
I’ve got that. Thank you. Got that. Okay. Deborah’s asked, how secure is this information once entered into teams? Deborah, I would suggest that it is extremely secure. The chances of anybody external getting into the Microsoft platform are very low. Particularly, well, the biggest risk to an external party getting access to your Microsoft tenants, your Microsoft environment there is actually your people and their passwords. So this is why we keep pounding on about multifactor authentication and how you really must have that enabled within your organization.

Ben Love [00:51:05]:
Okay, so in that sense, extremely secure in terms of securing your information within teams from other people within your own organization. So, for example, your finance department might have information in there that should not be accessed by other members of your staff. That is also very easy to do. Again, simply by how you set up the channel. You would set it up as a private channel and you would only invite into that channel people who need to access the information within that channel. Jules, how are you there? Ben, can we engage with people external to our business through teams? You absolutely can. We do it every day of the week. We have got a number of clients who themselves are very engaged users of Microsoft Teams, and we have frequent video calls and share content, et cetera, with them through teams.

Ben Love [00:52:02]:
It’s an extremely efficient and powerful way of doing it that we have found. And Mithy, how are you, mate? Mention about streaming and folder library. What is the total space or space per user for these libraries? That will depend on a couple of factors about your particular environment, your office 365 environment. We are very happy to confirm that for you, Mithy, but it will be a unique answer for you. I don’t have an off the bat answer for that, I’m sorry. And we use teams for chat internally. Can we track who has seen the messages within a chat? Poor super question. Top of my head.

Ben Love [00:52:48]:
I don’t think so. But I am just going to ask my team to make a note of that question as well, and we’ll see if we can get back to you, see if we can learn something more about that for you. And here’s just a clarification where you added in planner. Okay, folks, I think I’ve answered everybody’s questions there. I hope I have done a good job of sharing some ideas with you and of course of answering your questions grassroots. It can help with everything that we have discussed today. If you would like our assistance. And I am of course here to answer any follow up questions that you may have regarding this.

Ben Love [00:53:28]:
So you will have my details. Please reach out and say hello with any questions. We will also be sending you a follow up email at some point over the next week with a recording of this webinar, which you are very welcome to share with your team and with anybody else who you think may get value from what we’ve shared today. Thank you once again for joining us and have a great day.