Four basic tips for a successful Teams implementation

Covid-19 has changed the way we work. The shift to remote working created a sharp rise in businesses embracing messaging and cloud collaboration platforms like Teams. These tools continue to be used after the lockdowns. 

Not only does Teams ‘best-connect’ remote and flexible workforces, but it can also help boost team productivity, increase inter-department collaboration, and help your company complete tasks in a quick and efficient manner. The business case for Teams requires little explanation. It enables businesses to fully take advantage of the modern workplace, and in this complex world, businesses need every competitive advantage they can get.

Interestingly, our customers who already use Kordia for Microsoft Teams (direct route) access and connectivity services such as WAN and Internet, have also reported a significant performance increase in their O365 environment. With Kordia, all their Microsoft applications are ‘on-net’ Kordia all the way from their location to the Microsoft data centre, with no added latency or points of contention.

Kordia has many successful Teams transitions under its belt, from businesses that were fully prepared to embrace the platform, to those that did so at short notice as business operations changed.

We understand what makes a successful move to Teams and here are our top tips for a smooth transition:

1. Take the time to plan and test: Teams Voice is a real time, latency sensitive application that needs to be designed and implemented properly to achieve a quality experience for users. This is addressed with thorough preparation and assessment of existing environments. It’s a good idea to map existing user profiles and features to ensure feature parity (and improvement) can be designed into your new Teams personas.
2. Use available tools: Microsoft provide a free readiness assessment tool to ensure that your network environment does not impact the performance of your cloud voice deployment. Common areas that impact performance include available bandwidth, Firewall and proxy blockers, and network impairments like jitter and packet loss. Many Wi-Fi networks, for example, were not designed or implemented to support real-time media like Teams.
3. It’s not a set and forget exercise: You must consider how to maintain your environment, the impact on the Service Desk, and whether you should outsource key elements to a specialist provider. These providers can look after certificate management, routing changes, traffic monitoring, usage, trends, troubleshooting, business continuity planning and implementation.
4. Train your users: It may sound strange, but user training is an often-neglected task. Consider training your users before you migrate to Teams. Trained users will be more productive, collaborate more and find new ways to maximise your investment into Microsoft O365 and Teams.

Overall, as more businesses become confident in their new Teams environment, we’re seeing an increase in the number of those looking to switch to a managed service model so they can focus on other areas of their business.

Kordia’s Managed Teams service includes managed support for service transition to the O365 Teams calling environment, and an on-going managed service to take care of any faults and change requests relating to the customer’s Teams voice environment. Combined with innovative call plans including flat rate calling, customers are recognising the benefits of a collaborative workspace that facilitates a modern way of working. This is all underpinned by 24/7 support, redundant global infrastructure and a reputation for quality.

Many of our customers are surprised at how quick and painless the service transition is. So, if you haven’t yet started on your Teams journey, now’s the time.