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We translate a corporate portal in Microsoft Teams

Hello, Habr!

Microsoft's Teams corporate messenger audience exceeded 20 million users per day, the company said on November 19, 2019.

Teams is still ahead of its competitor - the corporate messenger Slack, which now has 12 million users.

In my humble opinion, this is a fairly logical gap, which will only grow further. Microsoft made an excellent product that allows you to work quite effectively in a team, especially when it is geographically distributed.

We have been using Teams almost from the first day of its existence on the Russian market, and recently in our company it has completely squeezed out the traditionally beloved portal on SharePoint Server, and the number of mail conversations has been reduced by an average of 5-7 times.

This topic is so large that it simply cannot be fit into 1-2 articles, so I’ll start with a general approach to using Microsoft Teams as a single entry point for our employees. Also in the near future I plan to release a series of technical articles if the topic is of interest to you.


What was the old portal like?


Our old portal was created on Microsoft SharePoint Server and was not just a portal, but rather a complete ecosystem for company employees, which includes the following main blocks:

  • A new employee is all that an employee who begins to work with us needs to know. In fact, this is a small knowledge base that includes the company's mission, useful links, access to internal communities and other usefulness for the smooth adaptation of employees.
  • – , , , . , , , , , .
  • – «» . , , , . 40 -.
  • . - : , , , HR. – .

Let me show you an example of how our community of analysts looked.



The introduction of the corporate portal increased the company's efficiency by 15% and seriously made life easier for remote offices.

The main disadvantages were:

  • A break with the main communication channel in the company (at that time it was mail + shadow IT in the form of communities in Skype).
  • To participate in the discussion, see the news or take a survey, you need to go to the portal.
  • Lack of a convenient mobile client.
  • The modest design.

Portal Concept at Microsoft Teams


We began to develop the concept of a new corporate space in Microsoft Teams according to the Microsoft methodology (Teams Assessment), which includes meetings with key teams, working out typical interaction scenarios and adapting these scenarios to Office 365 capabilities.

The first meetings were held with company managers (managing managers, HR, department heads and community, project managers). As a result, the general directions of changes became clear:

  1. Transfer all routine work (adaptation of employees, task reminders, sending information and much more) to chat bots.
  2. Implement a news feed on a SharePoint Online news site that connects seamlessly to Teams and proactively sends news feeds without having to log in to SharePoint.
  3. Distribute the company's popular services by channels and bots so that they match the scenarios of teamwork. For example, give project managers access to bookings of meeting rooms, acts, production plans and calendars; CRM, knowledge base and contracts - to salesmen, etc.
  4. Involve other tools that can further increase the effectiveness of communications (Planner, Stream, GitHub and others).

New employee


Previously, on the corporate portal, we had a newbie page, which listed the main services of the company, shared access, responsible for business processes.

With the introduction of Microsoft Teams, we went further. It was decided to make a full adaptation process using chat bots.

It looks like this:

  1. SharePoint Online . , – 1, SAP .


  2. HR , -.


  3. . , . – Microsoft Teams. ( -).


  4. HR , ( , , ).
  5. After getting to work, the bot according to the declared business process gradually sends the employee all the necessary information: who is your boss, links to resources, company rules, etc.
  6. Over time, the bot collects feedback on whether the employee is satisfied with everything in the company.



Company News and Events


To implement the main communication channels by employees, we have created a separate team.

At the moment, the team has several channels:

  • Common.
  • Jobs
  • Our life.
  • New employee.
  • Services.

We will continue to refine this concept. At the moment, not all employees included in the team can write to the shared channel. For talkers there is a channel Our life . They gather for a ski trip, buy old gramophones and take their children to mugs together.



Separate teams with their participants and branches have been created for unique talkers like the Women's Council or the exchange of tourist life hacks.

The General channel has several tabs.

The composition of the tabs depends on the direction of the channel. In our case, the News tab deserves maximum attention . When you go to it, the news page from SharePoint Online opens immediately.



Company Services


The topic of providing services to company employees deserves a separate post. Not all of them can and should be automated in O365 for various reasons. Often also because the company has already invested in other solutions for automating business processes (in my memory, there have been companies in which one employee has to work in 10 or more different systems).

We have not yet migrated all of our services to SharePoint Online. However, we really wanted our employees to have a single window for promptly obtaining the necessary documents, certificates and services.

This window was the chat bot at Microsoft Teams.

We turn to the bot with an arbitrary dialogue or simply select the desired service from the list and solve our problems without leaving the application.



The work takes place both in a simple dialogue mode and in the built-in cards for more complex processes.

For example, the process of ordering stationery.



The bot can send employees on business trips, create assignments, request the necessary information, return feedback forms, coordination tasks, and so on. Moreover, in the back it can have absolutely any system that has an API.

Thus, Microsoft Teams has become the main entry point for the quick launch of business processes. And in this regard, of course, its main value is the presence of a mobile client.

Communities


We implemented communities on the same principle of teams. I will show you with the example of a marketing team how such a space can be organized.

The Common Channel is the main work of the team. All discussions are conducted in their thread, which is very convenient.

And it’s even more convenient to be able to co-edit any documents (especially presentations) directly from the Documents tab .



The entire community knowledge base can be laid out in a separate tab both as a document library and in other tools.

In the community channels, we actively run Planner. On other tabs, there is all the RAM for conferences, content, work with suppliers.



Instead of a conclusion


We are still in the process of transferring everything that has been accumulated in the company to the O365 ecosystem, but already now we are seeing positive results both at our place and at our partners and customers.

Somewhere I read the phrase "Innovation is a team sport." And in Microsoft Teams, this phrase is fully reflected.

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