Item: Microsoft Teams
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently my team and our customer support team both use Microsoft Teams. We use to for both communicating and collaborating. The really good thing about Microsoft Teams is that it lets you create communication channels based on your preference. So you can have separate channels for multiple teams that are exclusive to them but you can also have a large overarching channel that everyone can access. That is how we use it. Individual team channels handle internal communication while the overarching channel lets us work with our support staff to share data, documents and chat. Since we moved to Teams our internal communication has really become streamlined and it has help us set up a process to respond faster to our clients.

Pros and Cons

You can separate your teams to create different channels so that there is no unwanted cross talk.
It's easier and faster to send files and documents through Teams than through email.
Eliminates a lot of large, unwanted email trails.
Works great on mobile phone. Perfect for keeping in touch on the go.

It runs pretty sluggishly on our Windows PC's. Granted these are generally old computers but the performance is still not great.
More options for customizing notifications would be great. It's pretty limited at the moment.

Return on Investment

It really improved our inter-team communication. That has noticeably improved our ability to respond to customer queries faster.
Cutting down on email trails also saves us a bunch of time.
Since chat history is always accessible, it leads to improved accountability.

Alternatives Considered

Slack

I liked Slack just as much as Microsoft Teams. We opted to stay with Teams because we were already using Microsoft Office and I think this integrates better with Office.

Support Rating

Microsoft support has been always pretty solid for me and this is no different. They are easily accessible and people that answer the phone are usually pretty helpful. Even when an issue is escalated, callbacks happen from the right people reliably. I have absolutely no complaints.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Teams go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Teams again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Asana, Zoho Chat, TeamViewer

Likelihood to Recommend

I think most mid and large sized organizations would benefit from Microsoft Teams. If you are not already using Slack then I think you should definitely at least check it out. I believe its part of the package with Office 365 business so you probably can implement it really quickly if needed.

However considering that it's a team-based software, its usage is pretty limited if you don't have large, multiple teams.

Great alternative to Slack that you should seriously consider.

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Teams