Microsoft Teams makes digital collaboration as powerful as it has ever been. With all its capabilities, it can be hard to know where to start when making the transition to Microsoft Teams. Whether you want to build off your existing Microsoft 365 infrastructure, or to upgrade from Skype for Business, your path to Microsoft Teams may not be easy to figure out on your own. Microsoft’s Advisor for Teams is a powerful tool that can help you and your organization address these challenges as you transition to effective Microsoft Teams management.
The Advisor for Teams guides your organization through the steps needed to make the leap to Microsoft Teams. Instead of making guesses about what you need to begin onboarding your organization onto Microsoft Teams, Advisor for Teams tells you the steps you need to take and helps guide you through completing them.
The tool takes advantage of the collaboration tools in Teams, Forms, and Planner, allowing you to bring together the members of your organization who will drive your transition and digital adoption to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft first unveiled the tool in 2019, and was made widely available during this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference.
Advisor for Teams can assist with three types of transitions to Microsoft Teams. The Chat, teams, channels, and apps plan helps you set up a collaboration infrastructure within your organization that can supplement and build off your Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The Meetings and conferencing plan prepares you to host larger events using Microsoft Teams. If you are already using Skype for Business Online or on-premises, the Skype for Business upgrade plan makes it easy to transition to Microsoft Teams.
A key aspect of all three transition plans that Advisor for Teams offers is the tenant readiness assessment. Advisor for Teams can assess how ready your existing environment is to make the transition to Microsoft Teams, conducting multiple assessments that look at the licensing, permissions, group configurations, and more across your organization’s tenant. The tool provides recommendations of how to best address any warnings that come from the assessment and incorporate those actions into your onboarding and deployment plan.
After the assessment, Advisor for Teams creates a Deployment team within Microsoft Teams, helping your team to collaborate and become familiar with the platform. You can add members of your transition team to this team, giving your organization one place to track the progress with your Teams deployment.
Each Deployment team will have a Planner plan associated with the workload transitions you wish to take, providing a unified area to manage the steps needed to make your transition happen. The Planner is configured with tasks, subtasks, and statuses that make it easy to assign and track what steps you need to take as you transition to Teams.
The tool also uses Forms to survey the users in your organization about their needs with Microsoft Teams, giving you data to drive decisions you make in the deployment process. Deploying with this data helps ensure that your users are at the forefront of your collaboration experience, easing the burden that comes with transitioning to a new platform like Teams.
Advisor for Teams supports your organization as you make the transition to Microsoft Teams. Instead of going it alone, the tool provides guidance through Teams, Planner and Forms that guide your deployment, along with customization abilities that help you manage the unique nuances of the transition within your organization.
If you need additional support with your transition to effective Microsoft Teams management, Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers like Total Solutions can help you manage your deployment with the Advisor for Teams . CSPs with access to your tenant can serve as an expert supporting your deployment team, leveraging their Microsoft Teams management expertise to take deployment challenges off your plate.
Total Solutions is a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider who can help drive your deployment to Microsoft Teams and the rest of Microsoft 365 through the Advisor for Teams.
