Item: Microsoft Teams
Rating: 7
Author: Charles R. Coggins III

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

MS Teams is being used by our entire organization. We mostly use Teams as a form of communication between all the employees. There has been plenty of times though where we use the video chat functions to do meetings with members of the teams who are out of state. We were looking into using VoIP that is also built-in, but this is super expensive even for a small company like ourselves. The business problem this solves for us is the ability to quickly communicate with each other without having to send out an email and hoping the other user gets it. This also allows you to see in Teams if the user is available, busy, away, or just not online at all.

Pros and Cons

Teams is excellent for a business where employees in the company are not located in the same building and need to communicate with each other.
Team's does Video and Audio calling really well. We have not experienced any issues with quality as of yet.

The biggest downfall with Teams is some users experience slowness with this product. I personally have not had an issue, but I am the IT person who goes around and fixes issues in-house and I sometimes see Teams causing huge CPU and Memory spikes and watch the software lag on peoples PC's for no reason.
I also don't like the way it stores attachments. If you add an attachment to a message it will store it in a folder and sometimes that folder is really hard to find.

Return on Investment

I believe it has all been positive it allows us to communicate with everyone who works with us without any real issues.
The MS Teams Product looks to be free so we did not have to invest anything into this product and it works great.

Alternatives Considered

I have not used any other meeting or chat software that is business-oriented.

Support Rating

Getting support for any MS Product kind of feels like pulling teeth. I have looked for support on the slowness of Teams to try and resolve it, but there is nothing really out there even from the MS reps other than deleting the hidden appsdata folder for Teams or uninstall/reinstall the software or just use the web-based Teams app.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Teams delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Teams's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Teams live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Microsoft Teams go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Microsoft Teams again?

Yes

Other Software Used

ConnectWise Control (formerly ScreenConnect), TeamViewer

Likelihood to Recommend

I really think MS Teams is well suited for any organization. I don't have experience with Slack or any other actual business messaging service though. If you have people you need to speak with frequently then this is a great solution. It works really well for IT Support especially when we have new staff that always require help. They can just send screenshots of what they are seeing in a message to a group of support people (you can create groups and add a bunch of people to the group) and someone can help them out pretty quickly.

The only thing I can think of that would not be a good scenario would be if you are running mostly Linux desktops. Teams did just come out with a Linux version though, but I have not had a chance to use it. Also if you didn't like to use MS Products there are other options out there.

MS Teams a wonderful small business application

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams