Microsoft Teams: Collaboration Reimagined

Microsoft Teams adoption continues to grow at an exponential rate - so much so that Microsoft has indicated that they now have more than 75 million daily active users on Teams. Whether you love it, hate it, or are still on the fence, the reality is that Teams continues to emerge as a full-service hub for managing all kinds of daily business activities.

With this concept in mind, our objective here today is to look at how Teams can provide users with a one-stop shop for carrying out their daily job duties - whether they're in the office, working virtually, or on the go. In these unprecedented times that we're living in today, having these kinds of productivity enablers can be crucial for reimagining work streams in the modern digital workplace.

Teams as a Platform

Although casual users may primarily see Teams as a tool to chat and collaborate with co-workers (a la Skype for Business), there's quite a bit more functionality in the Teams app that's just waiting to be unleashed. Of course, in order to unlock most of this functionality, you must be a part of one or more teams.

Whenever a team is formed in Microsoft Teams, a couple of magical things happen behind the scenes:

1. A "group" is created in Microsoft 365 (and by extension its corresponding Azure Active Directory tenant account). These groups define team membership and are essential for determining role-based access within a team.
2. A corresponding SharePoint site is setup in SharePoint Online. This is the place where all the team's files are stored.

While most users won't know or care about these background steps, they do set the stage for much more powerful collaboration capabilities. To understand how this works, consider the figure below. Here, we have a brand new team defined with a default General channel. As users open up that channel, they can see posts within that team, a Files tab where they can start sharing/collaborating on files, and a Wiki page. These are all useful features of course, but features that are pretty common to most collaboration tools.

But look what happens whenever we click on the "+" icon next to the Wiki tab (see above). Here, we're given the option to embed a number of powerful apps directly into the Teams app experience. The screenshot below highlights some of the more common app types that can be integrated.

Looking at the figure above, let's briefly touch on some of the more notable integration options:

• Microsoft 365: Although you would probably expect tight integration with Office apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, notice that you can also embed Visio to make it possible for users to collaborate on complex technical or architectural diagrams.
• SharePoint: As we mentioned earlier, each team in Microsoft gets its own SharePoint site that's used to store files that the team is collaborating on. However, you're not limited to just using the SharePoint site for storage. You can also create and integrate SharePoint lists and other SharePoint app types.
• Microsoft Planner: If you're not familiar with this app, it's definitely worth checking out. In essence, it provides teams with a user-friendly Kanban board or task list to manage assigned tasks.
• Power Apps: Power Apps is a low-code framework that makes it easy to create industrial-grade apps. We'll circle back to this topic in just a minute.
• Power BI: Power BI is a power business intelligence (BI) tool provided by Microsoft that can be used to (quickly) create reports and dashboards using a variety of data sources - from simple Excel and text files to enterprise-grade databases and data warehouses.
• Forms: With Microsoft Forms, you can create and embed complex surveys and questionnaires within a team site. Forms also integrates with Microsoft's Power Platform to enable analysis of survey results, etc.
• Websites: Besides the "canned" app types, you can also embed just about any web app into your team channel using the "Website" app type. Here, just plug in the app's URL and users will be able to access it right from within their Teams app.

In many ways, these app integration options are just the tip of the iceberg. The complete list of app types that you can embed in Teams is quite large (and growing by the day). Moreover, we should point out that this list doesn't include all of the custom integration options available to app makers. Suffice it to say that the integration possibilities are truly endless.

Creating a Unified Experience

Looking at this from a business perspective, you might be wondering how all these pieces fit together. To better illustrate the Teams-as-a-platform concept, let's consider how we might leverage these features to empower a sales team that's distributed across various territories. Here, imagine that several sales team members are collaborating on a large deal. In this scenario, we might set up a new team to provide a place for the sales team to work on the deal.

To start, the sales team members would use the basic features of Teams to collaborate on the deal: they can use chat and video conferencing features to discuss the deal, share and collaborate on documents via SharePoint, and so forth. They can also use the embedded calendar to schedule meetings. Now, let's look at what else they can do using some of the more advanced integration features offered by Teams.

Managing Assigned Tasks

As the deal matures, the team may discover that there are a lot of tasks that need to be coordinated, so they create a task plan in Microsoft Planner and embed that task plan into the team site. As assignments are made and due dates are reached, Planner will send alerts to the team to make sure everything keeps moving forward.

Another nice feature of Planner is its built-in charts/schedule visualizations. These are nice for viewing the progress of the task list at a glance.

Embedded Analytics

As the team performs its research for the deal, they would like to be able to look at some advanced analytics that provide insight into customer buying habits, sales trends, etc. Rather than having to jump out of Teams and log onto some other BI tool to view this data, they'd like to have the numbers right there within Teams. Using Power BI, this is surprisingly easy to accomplish. Using the Add Power BI app wizard, we can simply point to the target report/dashboard and et voilà - the data's right there at your fingertips. You can drill down, across and filter data to your heart's content right from within Teams.

Behind the scenes, the sales data in question could be coming from Salesforce, Dynamics 365, or any other CRM solution you might be running - whether that's in the cloud or on-premise. All the same security checks remain intact, so users can only see data that they're authorized to see.

Embedding Power Apps

As the sales team negotiates the deal, they may have a complex process they manage where they run through simulations with different variables to learn how they can maximize profits, increase margins, etc. Today, that process is managed offline in an Excel workbook where all the inputs are collected manually and formulas are applied to run through different simulations. Here, a lot of time is wasted collecting data from the company's CRM system and tweaking formulas in Excel.

To streamline process flow, we can replace the Excel workbook with an embedded Power App. In this scenario, we can pull the data points directly from the CRM system(s) and create a form that guides the users through the simulation process (e.g. via a step-by-step wizard). As the process evolves, this app provides a much more powerful foundation for further enhancements (and also protects the business in the event that the sales team's resident sales/Excel guru leaves the company).

While this simulation app might be somewhat contrived, the point is that Power Apps makes it possible to (securely) open up system access to team members. With over 300 standard connectors available (not to mention the ability to create custom ones), the mash-up possibilities are endless. Here at Bowdark, we've enabled access to SAP, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, DocuSign, and Google Maps just to name a few potential integration points.

While such integrations often require deep technical knowledge, one of the great things about Power Apps is that it's designed from the ground up to support citizen developers. In July, Microsoft made a big announcement in this area about a new solution called Microsoft Dataflex for Teams. Although Dataflex is still a ways away from general availability, it shows Microsoft's commitment towards making citizen app development in Teams much more accessible.

Power Automate and Workflow

Another interesting integration option with Teams is Power Automate (formerly known as Flow). Power Automate is Microsoft's cloud-based workflow and automation solution. As such, it mostly operates behind the scenes, automating selected tasks and streamlining process flow. Like Power Apps, Power Automate has access to hundreds of connectors that can be used to integrate with a variety of business systems and services - either in the cloud and on-premise.

Another compelling feature of Power Automate is its ability to drive bi-directional communications between frontend and backend systems. Getting back to our sales team's deal example, let's imagine that a major manufacturing delay is identified in the company's backend ERP system (e.g. SAP ERP). Since this event could have a major impact on the deal, the sales team needs to be alerted asap. Using Power Automate, we could intercept the event from the backend ERP system and send out an alert message to the team in real time. The team could then turn around and access an embedded app or Power App to see what's going on in the backend ERP system so that they can respond accordingly.

Chatbots & Virtual Agents

As our sales team works through their deal, they will likely have many questions about their prospective customer. Although we might provide access to this customer data using more traditional means (e.g. by embedding access to the company CRM solution or dropping in customer reports built in Power BI), another interesting option would be to embed a virtual agent (i.e. a chatbot) that can respond to common queries. Using Power Virtual Agents, you can interactively develop a conversational agent that users can chat with.

As you can see in the figure above, we can integrate flows from Power Automate into these virtual agents, making it possible for us to talk to backend systems and fetch useful information. Depending on how the conversation plays out, we might be pulling in customer data from CRM, marketing, or other systems to supply customer demographic information.

Exploring the Benefits of Using Teams as a Platform

Although there are many collaboration tools out there to choose from, Teams offers a very unique offering in the market in terms of both the breadth and depth of its integration capabilities. From an end user perspective, this kind of coverage is crucial to smoothing out work streams and preventing fragmentation (i.e. places where users have to get out of Teams to perform selected tasks). Since our goal is to provide users with a one-stop shop to carry out their job duties, the more functionality we can bring together under one roof, the better.

Reduced Training Costs

Another benefit of consolidation is that it helps reduce training costs. Instead of learning how to navigate between 5-10 apps, users can be trained on performing their tasks directly within Teams using a more simplified, role-based interface. When designed carefully, users should just see the functions/features that are applicable to them, so less time is spent teaching users how to hunt down the functionality they need to perform a given task.

Faster Onboarding

Building on the foundations of the Power Platform means that it's much easier to get users onboarded with access to the apps that they need to carry out their jobs. This is especially critical for mobile users who may have been difficult to onboard in the past. With careful design, it should be possible to get new users plugged in right from day one.

Closing Thoughts

We hope that this article helped you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of Microsoft's vision for Teams as a platform. Although many customers have not progressed to this point in their Teams journey, it's nice to see that Microsoft continues to make these expanded integration capabilities more and more accessible. This makes it easy for customers to innovate at their own pace and adopt the tools/services that make the most sense for their business.

If you have questions about how to apply this at your business, we'd love to hear from you! Please drop us an email at [email protected] and we'll get in touch to see where we can help.