Volleying Microsoft Teams and Outlook in a productive way

In a recent post, I dove into some of the surprisingly awesome things about Microsoft Teams. MS Teams is the new chat-based collaboration tool that brings a lot of what you do on a daily basis (communication, audio/video calls, file sharing, and project planning, with plug-ins for some of your favorite third-party tools) all into one place.

If you end up giving MS Teams a shot, you’ll probably love it. But not everyone uses it. And it’s unlikely that you’ll be moving 100% to MS Teams anytime soon. But for those interactions where you can use it, I suggest it. That leaves you with two main communication apps going at once: Outlook and MS Teams (note: MS Teams effectively replaces any need for Skype for Business).

It’s not a bad thing to use both, trust me. This article explains how my team currently uses both apps effectively, efficiently, and in a way that’s surprisingly not annoying. And how you can keep email and chat recorded in the same Office 365 Group.

A quick MS Teams primer

MS Teams is essentially a wrapper or portal that brings together many of your apps into one place. But MS Teams is also a paradigm shift because its main form of written communication is persistent chat. It’s a replacement, in certain instances, for email.

A chat-based form of communicating might seem new or scary, but think about how you text your family and friends. iMessage on iOS and Messages on Android? Those are actually persistent chat. And for years, this has been natural to millions of those users. It’s just as natural in a work setting.

Under the hood

A Team in MS Teams is actually an Office 365 Group. When you create a Team in MS Teams, it creates an online workplace that provides workspaces in a number of Office 365 apps. Believe it or not, with a Team (and its associated chat-based conversations), it also comes with a standard Outlook inbox and shared calendar. This is something that normally comes with an Outlook Group (another type of Office 365 Group). More details here.

This is critical to know because it means that you can get the benefits of using the Outlook Group inbox to track emails for the communications that can’t take place in MS Teams. But it still lets your Group keep all relevant and important conversations organized and protected by the same Group.

It’s also good to know that if you already have an Outlook Group that you like, you can add Teams to it later if you want, which will help the use case I’m describing below.

MS Teams for internal, Outlook for external

The whole point of Office 365 Groups (including Teams and Outlook Groups) is to centralize content and communication, based on permissions. Those permissions generally represent a project team, organizational unit, community, etc.

Consider discussions within this group as internal. True, your company may be 10,000 strong and your group only 20. But stay with me on internal meaning your group, which happens to be your (Office 365) Group. Or your Team. Any communications you have with someone who’s not already part of your group is external, whether they’re within your organization, or if they’re at a completely different entity.

My use case is to have all internal discussions on MS Teams and all external discussions in Outlook, while keeping your conversations organized, saved, and accessible in your Group. Your emails get stored centrally within the Office 365 Group behind your Team and your chats stay in MS Teams natively. You can expand on this as more colleagues elsewhere in your organization adopt MS Teams and interact with them in MS Teams instead, but until then, Outlook will still be number one for the time being.

Standardize internal communication

Start small with MS Teams. It’s much easier to talk the 20-person group into using a new collaboration method than the whole company. In fact, if you give it a test drive with a quarter of that group, those others will likely be all in favor of the new chat-based communication method.

It just feels natural and removes a lot of anxiety that comes with email. Once you’ve got some buy-in from other group members, suggest a group meeting to discuss collaboration moving forward. Demo the product, ask nicely for a trial period (say, two weeks), set some ground rules (#1 all chat, no email), agree to hold each other accountable, get the various apps installed, and get working.

You’ll have some growing pains, no doubt. But they’ll be worth it. You don’t even really have to change how you do file sharing if you’re already using SharePoint. It’s built in to MS Teams. As you experience flux within your group, new members start and get added to the Team; they magically gain access to all the chats (including history!), files, and any other MS Teams tools you’re using. When they leave the Team, they lose all access. Great for both onboarding and security.

As you work through adoption of the new system, make sure to hold your group accountable. Email is a no-no if communicating only with internal people. Files get saved through MS Teams (into SharePoint) and discussions about those files occur in-line in the documents or in MS Teams conversations around the document.

People that don’t follow the rules need to have their wrists slapped. As a couple people slip up and get away with it, it becomes easy for others to do the same and soon enough you’ve lost all law and order. So agree early on that emails sent internally will get a polite “Please put this in Teams” response and that no other response will be provided.

Your internal communications are now covered. You have them centralized, connected to your files in SharePoint, and everything is now available on Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS. You can literally do your work anywhere, in a natural way.

Now take on external communication

So, you’ve still got to deal with plenty of external people. They could be colleagues at your company that provide input, peer reviews, or need your output. They could also be vendors, customers, clients, constituents, or others. Email is still their communication method of choice. But you want to track those conversations centrally with the rest of your group.

It’s actually quite easy. As I mentioned above, each Team also gets an Outlook inbox and shared calendar, just like with an Outlook Group. (That said, Microsoft made a change recently where you have to put some effort in to surface the Outlook Group.) If you want to keep group-related external conversation in one place, all you have to do is cc the Team’s email address. You can see those the emails by going to Outlook and looking at your Groups on the bottom of the left-hand navigation. Your Team’s name is actually there. Surprise!

Keeping your Team’s email address in the loop on all relevant emails means you build an organic running history of email of external discussion. And, again, this is great for when someone joins or leaves the Team: they gain access to all historical emails when joining and lose access to all emails when leaving.

You just have to make sure everyone in your group—plus any external folks who email you regularly—also cc’s your Team’s email address. Keep in mind that this email address isn’t a distribution group; it doesn’t forward the email to your Team. It simply acts as a record keeper (almost a scribe!) for your Team.

Each of your Team members decides whether to also send a copy of an email response to the Group, to keep as a record. Extraneous messages, platitudes, non-relevant jokes, things like that shouldn’t get sent to the Group; they’re not useful content. Only include the Group when the email identifies accomplishments, requests, responses, and other impactful information.

Your external conversations are now basically covered. You have a solid line between internal (simple, easy, efficient, awesome!) collaboration and external (clunky, reply-all, always jumping between apps) communication.

Conversing between Teams and Outlook

Now what do you do when a client asks for more information on a new proposal you recently sent in? Do you reply and have the conversation via email because that’s where they contacted you?

No.

Say it with me now: I will not reply immediately via email.

Instead, bring the discussion into MS Teams, start a new internal conversation, @mention the correct people, ask for feedback/input, come to a conclusion, then reply to the emailed question, cc the Team’s email address, and include any internal people who have formal need to know of the communication with the client.

“But how do I get the email into Teams, though?” Three answers. First, you can forward the email to your Channel of choice using your Channel's email address. This works phenomenally well, but it also brings in lots of yucky formatting text and it might be a lot to read. Second, you can copy and paste the email content into a new MS Teams conversation (no yucky formatting, retain the ability to add a subject line, etc.). Lastly, you could do everyone else a favor and summarize the email in your own words so they don’t waste time on any fluffy, pointless, or extraneous words. Get to the point, discuss it quickly, build a response. Then send the response via email.

MS Teams basically becomes a de facto staging ground for all formal responses with outside people.

And what happens in the future?

I’m not sure yet. Frankly, I think this method is an elegant way to gain the efficiency boosts that come with MS Teams while still meeting the needs of email-based organizations you’re required to interact with. Once external users start using MS Teams and external sharing becomes more popular, communication will become more complex.

On the plus side, as MS Teams usage expands within your organization, your idea of internal will become larger because more people will have used MS Teams and be willing to jump on from the start. That means you could be part multiple internal Teams and even some of the aforementioned external discussions could actually become internal because they’re on MS Teams.

Just be careful about the number of Teams and Channels you use. You have to be smart about how those are created. Ad-hoc creation of them is not smart. Make sure you have a reason for each. Otherwise you’ll end up with content creep horror stories. But they’re not on the app; they’re on your work processes, sorry to say.

Over time, MS Teams usage can begin consolidating and become a much larger percentage of your communication and collaboration app usage. Eventually, hopefully, you can say goodbye to Outlook. At that point, MS Teams will likely be the one major app you need because it supports so many connections elsewhere. That will be pretty cool.

Conclusion

Keeping your stuff organized is critical. Being able to seamlessly communicate and collaborate with your colleagues is also. At first glance, you may think this method is clunky. But in practice it’s actually not. And it’s scalable. As you have more Teams, you can keep more conversations internal, while recording external email in various Teams (Groups).

My email count has dropped significantly. I’m better organized because MS Teams is itself better organized. No worries of who I should reply all to, or mistakenly sending an internal email to a client. No folder structure to ceaselessly update. It’s easier to get a hold of my internal team (Do I email him? Do I text her? Do I call? No! TEAMS! Their notifications will be just like text messages.)

And search is so much better in MS Teams than Outlook!

This whole thing may seem counterintuitive, but I can tell you from real experience that it works. You should try it. And let me know how it works out for you. If you’re interested in taking the dive into the future of collaboration, feel free to reach out. My team is always willing to help and even run the adoption process.

Disclaimer

“MS Teams” means Microsoft Teams, the application. When “Team” or “Group” are capitalized, I refer to the official Microsoft Office 365 Group associated with an MS Teams Team. Lower-case “team” and “group” refer to the vernacular English definition.