Reflections on using Microsoft Teams at Ignite

After spending a week at Microsoft Ignite, I thought I would give a quick reflection on how I used Microsoft Teams during the conference.

For background, I have been using Teams at work since it was released as a public preview. We utilize it quite heavily for group communication. In fact, we replaced GroupMe at our team event back in April with Microsoft Teams in order to communicate where people were at and what they were doing. Overall, I’ve been super happy with Teams for it’s original purpose of group communication.

First, Instant Messaging (IM). I utilized Teams as my primary (read: Only) IM client for the week of Ignite. Most of my messages were to my colleague who was at the conference with me. We would use IM to figure out where to meet up as we split up sessions that we went to in order to compare notes. This was super handy at times when a session I was in ended up early and his session was still going with good Q&A. I was able to know and slip in to catch some of the Q&A.

In addition to 1:1 IM, I used Teams to essentially live blog sessions back to my co-workers who were not able to attend. This was helpful as they could then ask questions that I would then ask in the session for them. I know other folks did similar things with shared OneNote notebooks but the live blog method worked for us.

Second, Voice. This is the area that surpised me. I have done many meetings on Teams. In fact, we have a monthly happy hour on Teams. What surprised me was when I got a call on the mobile client. I was not on the WiFi, I was just on 4g. If you have used the Skype for Business Mobile client, then you know how sketchy doing a VoIP call could be over 4g. Not so with Teams. Every call was super clear and stable. I was really impressed.

As I look forward to the change to Teams, I can honestly say, that from a user experience, I’m excited. When PSTN capabilities comes to Teams, it will very quickly replace Skype for Business as my primary client. While I realize that my experience might be unique based on how I work, I think that many organizations are going to benefit from these changes.