The persistent presence of the remote workforce has shifted the focus to collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams. This Microsoft Teams Quick Start Guide lays out a proven implementation process for deploying Teams, broadly discusses the timeline for doing so, and considers factors that may make a rollout more complicated and, therefore, longer.<\/p>\n
Our goal is to answer the many questions that may be on your mind, such as:<\/strong><\/p>\n By sharing what we have learned, we hope we can help you get up and running with the least possible amount of heartburn.<\/p>\n You can quickly bring Microsoft Teams<\/a> online, especially if your organization already uses Microsoft 365<\/a>. Licenses for most of Teams\u2019 underlying components, such as OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online, are part of Microsoft 365, and your employees are likely familiar with at least some of these. That said, as discussed in greater detail below, implementation times will vary based on your company\u2019s size, culture, technical maturity, and more.<\/p>\n Even if your company doesn\u2019t have Microsoft 365, you can still bring the full suite online quickly to start implementing Teams.<\/strong><\/p>\n And because Teams runs in the cloud, hardware procurement and setup is not an issue. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool with just about everything you need already in place. That makes our first step, technical readiness, easier to manage.<\/p>\n Today, some elements that would have been big deals in the past are standard parts of office environments, such as high-speed network access. This means that there are usually no technical showstoppers to a rapid deployment.<\/p>\n However, as you learn how to set up Microsoft Teams<\/a>, your team first needs to assess the organization\u2019s technical readiness by doing the following:<\/p>\n Review your current tenant configuration, focusing on Microsoft Teams integration<\/a> with things like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online, and the various security tools your organization has in place. The output of this work is a list of items you need to update in your tenant and any other interrelated components, such as your Active Directory or Azure Active Directory<\/a> architecture and your identity and access management (IAM) applications.<\/p>\n In this critically important step, consider the rules that will govern access rights to documents, team owner restrictions, guest access, Teams federation, team naming conventions, team lifecycle processes, regulatory compliance requirements, data retention rules, mobile device enablement and management, and auditing and monitoring requirements.<\/p>\n Some organizations like to run in a wide-open manner with few rules, but larger corporate environments and highly regulated industries such as healthcare or finance usually have strict legal rules to follow. Establishing a governance plan<\/a> is, therefore, critical.<\/strong><\/p>\n In your governance plan, the three most critical items are defining and enforcing team lifecycles (Team creation through Team deletion or archival), controlling guest access, and determining how to manage and set up the most critical Teams created to support the remote workers<\/a>.<\/p>\n While automating some of the governance policies and standards is a good practice, it\u2019s not necessary to have them in place on day one. Consider adding these capabilities further down the road so it doesn\u2019t slow your deployment timelines in response to the greater need to get the tool in place for your remote workers.<\/p>\n Use Microsoft\u2019s tools, such as Microsoft Copilot<\/a>, to perform these calculations \u2013 they are very helpful. Additionally, Teams is \u201csmart\u201d about throttling down hungry resources such as video during phone calls. Nevertheless, you need to spend time analyzing capacity.<\/p>\n With the right people in the room, you can do this quickly and with the adequate detail needed to support the remote workforce with the most essential collaboration and communication tools within Teams. One of the most critical areas to examine: Do remote workers need to access the Microsoft 365 tenant services without traversing back to your organization\u2019s internal network through VPN?<\/strong><\/p>\n Start with making sure you have the basic security configurations to meet your minimum standards. Then, enable licenses of key services, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange, and configure external access for those services.<\/p>\n Plus, configure Teams to limit who can create new Teams, control who can add guests, establish basic controls over meetings, and regulate private channel creation. But look out for things that will potentially slow you down or take extra time, such as enhanced security and compliance features in Microsoft 365, designing and implementing automation that enforces governance policies, and defining standard templates to support numerous different use cases of Teams.<\/p>\n In our experience, it\u2019s things like having complicated conversion requirements of older versions of SharePoint<\/a> and requiring custom functionality that you must rebuild in the new Teams environment. It can also include deploying complicated compliance and regulatory requirements.<\/p>\n While Teams readily handles security and document access rights, fully understanding how they will work and who has access to them can take time.<\/strong> Items that seem small, like integrating with custom authorization and authentication methods, migrating files and emails from other sources, or meshing Teams with third-party applications can take up more of your time than expected.<\/p>\n Lastly, when implementing complex access rules, you need to apply them to both mobile and laptop or desktop devices, which will delay deployment.<\/p>\n Organizational readiness is about fully preparing to roll out an application that fundamentally changes how people work. Consider for a moment what the Teams product encompasses: voice and video calling, meeting scheduling, file sharing, instant messaging, collaborative document creation and editing, whiteboards, email integration, and so much more.<\/p>\n Microsoft Teams encompasses most of the fundamental building blocks of digital workers\u2019 day-to-day lives<\/a>, touching literally every aspect of almost all basic office tasks. Therefore, it truly impacts every aspect of how people work together.<\/p>\n Add to that Teams\u2019 ability to enable remote workers to interact in a much more complete manner, and you\u2019ve really got a case for investing in change management within your organization. Essentially, everyone\u2019s behavior needs to change<\/a> given the changes in how they work day-to-day.<\/strong><\/p>\n Here are some techniques that can help you define the scope of your adoption needs and, of course, create an adoption plan:<\/p>\n There are a couple of tricky items you\u2019ll need to keep in mind during organizational readiness. For example, you\u2019ll need to ensure you properly train and resource your support staff. Along that same line, providing continual and targeted education of \u2014 and communications to \u2014 end users, managers and leaders, and support staff is essential.<\/p>\n Your governance plan should also include organizational readiness, and as such, you should allow it to evolve based on the needs of your organization and business leaders. To help, you\u2019ll want to decentralize the management of Teams using team owners<\/strong> and audit what they\u2019re doing to ensure they follow the governance policies.<\/p>\n Lastly, Microsoft is constantly growing and changing, so you\u2019ll want to keep abreast of the changes Microsoft pushes<\/a> to your tenant to ensure end users are aware of what\u2019s coming and how it could impact them.<\/p>\n The information you have gathered and the work you have done so far will drive your deployment plan. Ideally, it will include details about Microsoft Teams tenant configuration (see technical readiness); change management activities, such as communication plans, resistance management plans, training plans, live and remote training sessions (see organizational readiness); and plans for longer-term support and training.<\/p>\n As we are discussing the Microsoft Teams Quick Start Guide \u2013 not a slow start \u2013\u00a0keep your planning as lean as you can to get the most important collaboration and communications tools in front of your end users as fast as possible.<\/strong><\/p>\n Post-deployment support is, of course, important, but it\u2019s probably not what you think it is.<\/p>\n In most cases, providing post-deployment support is not horrifically complicate because the traditionally \u201cvery hard stuff\u201d largely goes away because of Teams\u2019 cloud-based nature. It is not deployed on-premise, so you face no server maintenance, no patching, and no worrying about scaling to increase application performance.<\/p>\n What you will run into is 1. the need for someone who\u2019s skilled and knowledgeable in working in a cloud environment and has a good understanding of administering Microsoft 365, and 2. the confusion found within a large population of new Microsoft 365 users. Of course, your adoption plan helps here.<\/p>\n But as people lay their hands on the keyboards and try to collaborate and communicate, you will have confusion and questions.<\/strong> It will gradually settle, but you do need to be proactive rather than reactive for these users. You can\u2019t simply set it loose, and you will need all or some of the following at the ready:<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m surprised you cannot tell me the precise timeline,\u201d said no experienced IT person ever. However, while determining a specific implementation and adoption timeline is difficult, key factors include licensing status, network deficiencies, number of seats and geographic locations, and security and compliance requirements.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll also have to consider how Microsoft Teams will play with other applications, such as integration with third-party applications, federation with other domains, and integration with various IAM solutions. Finally, your employees\u2019 experience level will play a significant role in determining a timeline.<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s consider three different timeline scenarios:<\/p>\n In all three cases, you can get started quickly by rolling out the most important features to your business. Then, it\u2019s all about doing what you can to reduce confusion among novice users, converting them to unskilled believers, and finally, to adept, experienced believers.<\/p>\n At some point, you just have to throw the switch and jump into the pool \u2013 whether you want them to jump into the shallow, the deep end, or somewhere in-between depends on your organization\u2019s culture, resourcing, your necessity for a transformation, and how risk-averse you are.<\/p>\n As you\u2019ve learned how to set up Microsoft Teams, one thing you should know is that some things are always lurking that could drive up costs and extend deployment timelines \u2013 especially when it comes to technology. Please consider the following as you do your planning:<\/p>\n Keep in mind that the key to successfully getting started with Microsoft Teams is to know your people, know your environment, and know which features are most important to your business. Then, strive to reduce confusion, keep communication lines open, recruit champions, and use education to convert resisters.<\/p>\n Whether you jump into the deep end with Teams or wade in from the shallow end depends on your organization\u2019s culture. But in most cases, Microsoft Teams will get you to a better place.<\/p>\n\n \n
How to Set Up Microsoft Teams<\/h2>\n
1. Technical Readiness<\/h2>\n
Examine your existing Microsoft 365 tenant\u2019s configuration (or that of your new tenant).<\/h3>\n
Discuss your governance plan for ongoing operations.<\/h3>\n
Review your network capacity.<\/h3>\n
Configure and turn on Teams<\/h3>\n
What are the typical items in a technical assessment that can lengthen deployment timelines?<\/h3>\n
2. Organizational Readiness<\/h2>\n
\n
3. Deployment Plan<\/h2>\n
4. Post-Deployment Support<\/h2>\n
\n
5. Implementation Timeline<\/h2>\n
\n
6. Lurking Gotchas<\/h2>\n
\n
Use the Microsoft Teams Quick Start Guide to Move Forward<\/h2>\n