The Urgent Need to Drive Usage Adoption for Microsoft Teams

Has COVID-19 changed the way organizations collaborate across boundaries? Remote work is becoming “the new normal” for companies and their employees dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Many of them are making do with the advent of Microsoft’s Office 365 collaboration tool called Microsoft Teams, which has been feverishly deployed by IT organizations around the world over the past few months. The number of MS Teams users has increased to over 44 million as stated by a CNBC report in late March.

MS Teams is becoming Office 365’s main collaboration client, unifying much of the suite’s products and underlying services. The importance of Microsoft Teams goes beyond the chat capabilities to its collaboration hub functions to share files, host meetings, coordinate activities and track tasks. However, most organizations are struggling with broadening usage adoption for MS Teams after the initial deployment.

Most people log into Microsoft Teams for the first time and perform the same activities they’ve always done in Skype, such as quick instant messaging or calls to their contact list. The more advanced features in MS Teams are used very little. The reason is that most users don’t know how much time they can save by leveraging these capabilities, or they’re simply afraid to use them. This tendency means many potential productivity benefits are never realized.

Addressing the challenges of driving adoption is a top-tier goal for most IT organizations around the world so they can unlock the potential ROI from their Microsoft Teams deployments.

To drive adoption and measure success, organizations must have access to current and historical usage data. Armed with this information, they can devise adoption strategies that specifically target users at every digital maturity level within Office 365 and MS Teams. They can then compare current activity with historical trends and measure the effectiveness of their adoption campaigns.

You can easily access intelligent insights such as these within OfficeExpert. In the latest release, you can even measure adoption trends by comparing Microsoft Teams usage against internal E-Mail messages. In future releases, you will be able to measure MS Teams activities against Skype for Business usage and much more!

For organizations that want to be more proactive in driving adoption and help their user community take advantage of some of the more advanced features in Microsoft Teams, they need a data analytics toolset like OfficeExpert.

There are other benefits waiting for you. OfficeExpert now provides capabilities to monitor and measure the performance for MS Teams meetings between users at different site locations. This helps identify any latency issues when users are collaborating remotely across geographic boundaries.

With OfficeExpert, you also have access to a native Microsoft Teams application called ACE – the Advanced Client Experience. ACE provides MS Teams owners with detailed usage information about the sites they own and showcases how their Microsoft Teams community is collaborating. This helps improve governance and foster the usage of MS Teams. There is also a Skills/Expertise Rating and Search system inside the ACE application. It makes it quick and easy to find subject matter experts (SME’s) across your entire organization. Check out these new functions in action by watching our recent webinar.

If you are interested in finding out more about our OfficeExpert data analytics solution and how it can help you increase usage adoption for your Microsoft Teams deployment, please visit our overview page online, or sign-up for a trial HERE.