Leveraging Teams as a Communications Platform

Microsoft has described Teams as the hub where work gets done.

This highlights the ability of Teams to integrate multiple communication and collaboration modalities within a single application: chat, asynchronous project updates and file sharing, meetings, calls (VoIP and PSTN).

The “hub” concept means that users are more often able to stay within the “flow” of work, avoiding mentally taxing and time-wasting “focus shifts”.

But how does work get done?

I would argue that to get work get done, the Teams hub needs to foster communication. As such, Teams is intended as a platform to enable communication and collaboration.

Broadly, a platform can be defined as a technology foundation upon which other processes, applications, or technologies are built.

A platform provides value because it can accelerate delivering business solutions and it can integrate multiple solutions to enable outcomes greater than any one single application vendor could provide. Without a platform approach, each vendor is tasked to provide the entirety, or the majority, of the required business functionality.

In a previous article, I discussed the different contact center integration models supported by Teams: Connect, Extend, Power. It is the Power model that most directly maps to adopting Teams as a communication platform.

Unlike the other models, the Power model builds on top of Teams and on top of what Teams is built on, Azure Communication Services (ACS). ACS provides APIs (application programming interfaces) and client SDKs (software development kits) that allow application developers to add or control voice, video, chat, SMS, and email capabilities within their applications. Teams uses ACS and a contact center built according to the Power model leverages both Teams (and its high-level APIs) and ACS (and its foundational APIs).

Microsoft has not finalized the criteria for a contact center to be validated as conforming to the Power model. As such, there are currently no contact centers “Power certified”. However, Anywhere365 is not letting this stop their progress, as they adopt what I call “the power model philosophy”, leveraging Teams as a communication and collaboration foundation.

With this approach, Anywhere365 encourage organizations to “Supercharge Microsoft Teams as a Communication Platform”. Instead of trying to reinvent or redevelop communication functionality that already exists, Anywhere365 leverages what Microsoft has already built. According to Anywhere365:

“We believe that Microsoft Teams creates a hub that does exactly this. It’s a platform to effectively connect people both inside and outside the company. A solid, reliable, and secure architecture for collaboration and communication.”

For organizations that have already adopted Teams, a platform approach can potentially provide several benefits:

1.??????Enhanced security – documents and communication metadata remain stored and are controlled by the extensive Microsoft cloud security and compliance capabilities.

2.??????Cost optimization – For most larger organizations, Teams capabilities are included within their Microsoft licensing “bundle”. Building on top of this, can potentially save organizations money.

3.??????Improved User Experience – users are not required to learn another application interface. They can remain in the flow of work and use the capabilities of Teams in a familiar way, simply enhanced with the new capabilities. This often improves user adoption.

4.??????Simplified Administration – for IT pros, leveraging the strong identity and access management (IAM) capabilities of Azure Active Directory reduces administrative burden.

To Platform or Silo?

A platform approach combines and integrates. In contrast, a siloed approach may deploy specialized, independent applications to specific groups within your organization, to support different use cases.

Both approaches can deliver success.

A “best of breed” philosophy, identifies point solutions for specific use cases with regard for a common interface, or storage, or administration substrate.

For most organizations who have adopted the Office 365 bundle that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams (and many other applications), I would suggest that you are already seeing benefits from a platform approach. If this is the case, it would seem prudent to explore a power model philosophy when looking to add additional communication automation or contact center functionality.

In this regard, Microsoft must believe that Anywhere365 is on the right track as they were just awarded a Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for 2023.