Microsoft Teams - YACT (Yet Another Collaboration Tool)
On Nov 2, MS released a preview of it's latest Team Collaboration tool called Teams for Office365 business customers across various license tiers.
Productivity and Collaboration tools have been a main stay of the Microsoft portfolio for years now. Office and Office365 are a $23B business to MS and is the single largest line of business.
And while one can argue that Office is the leader in Productivity - meaning content creation via Word, Excel and PowerPoint - MS has just flailed around over the last 10 - 15 years in the "Collaboration" space.
Looking back I have probably used everyone of MS's Collaboration Tools.
First it was Exchange - which gave use Email and Calendaring. Then came SharePoint that provided Doc Libs, and Web Parts for communities and ingesting content from Excel or SQL, or whatever using the Individual, Team and Corporate site model.
Then came Office Communications Server (OCS) which became Lync. They provided real time communication for IM, Voice and Conferencing and introduced concepts like Presence. Oh and then MS purchased Skype and renamed Lync to Skype for Business.
And then there was Yammer, the enterprise "Social Media" offering and most recently there was Delve a kind of re-take on individual sharepoint sites that did some auto collections of content across the content sprawl of OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, etc.
And so now here is Teams. So most industry observers are discussing it as a competitor to Slack. Teams provides another real time team chat capability that supports complex content, photos, graphs, emoji's, etc, etc.
I have not used Teams yet - so I can't say oh this is great or that is bad, but what I do know is it is what I am calling Yet Another Collaboration Tool (YACT) from MS.
If you're an Enterprise Office365 admin, this has to be driving you nuts. While all of these tools over the years have provided specific value, the one thing it has done is now created another container for information sprawl.
And even from an end-user standpoint, you could have content is upwards of 5 or 6 apps spread across who knows where in the cloud or on-prem or both. And the question really is - will it make your "teams" anymore productive ?
With any tool, it's the acceptance and usage of the end-user community that will ultimately determine it's value. And that is typically the challenge. Often while these tools exist they are not used consistently or by the entire "team" and therefore loose they intrinsic value. Similarly people really aren't trained very well is how to use them or they really don't want to bother with posting something. To them it's a waste of time.
Now sure that's a cultural issue and not really a technological one, but the one thing I've seen over and over with YACT is that acceptance across an enterprise is always mixed.
Bottom line is - okay we now have Microsoft Teams - is it really going to change he way people use Office365 or the they way they work ? Personally I'm doubtful...
Productivity and Collaboration tools have been a main stay of the Microsoft portfolio for years now. Office and Office365 are a $23B business to MS and is the single largest line of business.
And while one can argue that Office is the leader in Productivity - meaning content creation via Word, Excel and PowerPoint - MS has just flailed around over the last 10 - 15 years in the "Collaboration" space.
Looking back I have probably used everyone of MS's Collaboration Tools.
First it was Exchange - which gave use Email and Calendaring. Then came SharePoint that provided Doc Libs, and Web Parts for communities and ingesting content from Excel or SQL, or whatever using the Individual, Team and Corporate site model.
Then came Office Communications Server (OCS) which became Lync. They provided real time communication for IM, Voice and Conferencing and introduced concepts like Presence. Oh and then MS purchased Skype and renamed Lync to Skype for Business.
And then there was Yammer, the enterprise "Social Media" offering and most recently there was Delve a kind of re-take on individual sharepoint sites that did some auto collections of content across the content sprawl of OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, etc.
And so now here is Teams. So most industry observers are discussing it as a competitor to Slack. Teams provides another real time team chat capability that supports complex content, photos, graphs, emoji's, etc, etc.
I have not used Teams yet - so I can't say oh this is great or that is bad, but what I do know is it is what I am calling Yet Another Collaboration Tool (YACT) from MS.
If you're an Enterprise Office365 admin, this has to be driving you nuts. While all of these tools over the years have provided specific value, the one thing it has done is now created another container for information sprawl.
And even from an end-user standpoint, you could have content is upwards of 5 or 6 apps spread across who knows where in the cloud or on-prem or both. And the question really is - will it make your "teams" anymore productive ?
With any tool, it's the acceptance and usage of the end-user community that will ultimately determine it's value. And that is typically the challenge. Often while these tools exist they are not used consistently or by the entire "team" and therefore loose they intrinsic value. Similarly people really aren't trained very well is how to use them or they really don't want to bother with posting something. To them it's a waste of time.
Now sure that's a cultural issue and not really a technological one, but the one thing I've seen over and over with YACT is that acceptance across an enterprise is always mixed.
Bottom line is - okay we now have Microsoft Teams - is it really going to change he way people use Office365 or the they way they work ? Personally I'm doubtful...
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