We’ve been using Teams for a week now and it’s plain to see that it will become THE UI for the everyday worker. I can actually see it being the business console for nearly everything. Sure the applications will still exist, but Teams will become the portal to access everything. Microsoft have an amazing opportunity that’s for sure.
What I’d love to do here is encourage a little debate around how to govern and control it.
As far as I can see – we have a definite hierarchy :
Teams > Channels > Tabs
1. How are people organising their Teams Structure (e.g. Teams = Projects > Channels = Functions (e.g. sales) > Tabs = Apps)?
2. Are you looking to ‘template’ a channel so it always has the same ‘Tabs’ ?
3. How can you control Teams so that you don’t end up with a mess of Channels and Tabs?
Here’s how we manage the channels for our product DocRead :
And this is how we manage the ‘Tabs’ under ‘Development’.
- Conversations = chat
- Files = Docs (stored in SharePoint)
- Notes = OneNote
- Features, Bugs, Development = Planner Boards
We have no governance around this area. I think it’s because we believe “TEAMS” is organic in it’s use. That is — anyone can create their team and channels, with that, anyone should be able to adhoc change their channels to fit their Teams Workflow.
I don’t think a Development Team’s channels/tabs would exhibit the same needs as a Business Team. I think the most important rule of governance around teams is… Naming Conventions for Team Groups (to make sure Groups are easy to find, but also self-describing).
One of the things we’ve done, is let Teams run wild, but for the development team, add a connector for Visual Studio Online (team services now), so we get up to date alerts when new tickets are added to the system (though the integration truly is poor). But then we’ve hooked up PowerBI to connect to VSO, so we can see how we are doing without having to navigate to VSO (team services).
I could be wrong but I don’t really enjoy locking down the Business Teams “Team” by enforcing governance…
