Before you jump full force into Teams (I know, probably too late), it is strongly recommended to work with an IT partner who can assist with a number of items including back-end management, security, data policies and don’t forget backup!

Implementing Teams involves three stages:

  • plan, deploy and roll-out

It is crucial to ensure proper metrics are in place before rolling out the program especially for account permissions and data policies. This includes an analysis of your own internal policies to ensure they match and properly protect the use of Teams with your staff. After all, you don’t want Hank from human resources sharing payroll information in a team that is public for the rest of your staff to see. And you might want to restrict use of urls or gifs (although I see them as a huge necessity myself ). I mean, who doesn’t like playing with gifs?

No alt text provided for this image

Part of the planning process should include early adopters who can act as the Teams “goto people”. You all have these people in your business. They are the ones who have the latest gadgets and enjoy jumping in with both feet to anything brand new! These individuals will help the rest of your company get excited about using Teams.

So you have your policies figured out, IT has assisted with some back-end help and your Teams adopters are rarin’ to go! Now what?

Consider these three stages:

  • start, experiment and scale

The nice thing about Teams is you can limit it to as little staff as you wish without having to go company wide. So start off small and experiment with what’s in place. Have the early adopters test it out in their daily work routines and they can bring back valuable feedback to scale the solution for roll out to everyone.

Ideally your IT partner will assist along the way but if you want to jump in to review some of the admin settings available within Teams; there is a direct link to do so. This link is best saved for one or two individuals considered Teams administrators. Otherwise the wrong click here or there could mean headaches for the entire company.

https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/

Remember there is a free version of Teams which is more appropriate for home users. Businesses larger than 3 people should use Teams with their Microsoft 365 plans. User assignment is done using Azure AD which will already exist behind the scenes within Microsoft 365 purchased plans.