The Advantages & Disadvantages of Microsoft Teams For Business

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While providing easy adoption or training services for Microsoft Office 365, we often get queries about Microsoft Teams, its roles, its efficiencies, and its shortcomings. So, how do we explain it to them? We usually share with them a decent list of pros and cons that helps them decide clearly and easily. For many companies, that have already been using Microsoft Office 365, the question is usually, how and when. Microsoft’s decision to invest in Microsoft Team instead of investing further in Skype for Business was intelligent and strategic. Because people nowadays don’t like being forced to use something until they clearly see the value it adds to their life. So, what are the advantages of using Microsoft Teams for your business? And what disadvantages it may offer?

In this blog post, we have listed the five foremost advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Teams for your business.

Advantages of Using Microsoft Teams

1. Enhanced Communication & Productivity Improvements

One may feel distorted by the extensive range of collaboration tools offered by Microsoft Office 365. But with MS Teams, you simply don’t need to look for another tool or app for collaboration. MS Teams enhances your business productivity by making all your conversations, collaborations, online meetings, file sharing, task management, and chats, etc. available and organized under one single interface and app. Additionally, MS Team integrates really well with other third-party and Microsoft tools which means that the users never have to leave the Teams app to get their desired collaboration task completed.  MS Teams also support various types of gifs, emoticons, likes and live link previews options, etc. that remarkably enrich communication.

2. Improved Focus On Your Work

With MS Teams, you can certainly have a better focus on your work and can better prioritize your time. Because with Team, you don’t need that extra amount of time that you spent scrolling down the inbox which contains all your messages and emails from everyone. Instead, easy categorization of information in terms of channels and context is very much possible in Teams. The channels contain meetings, documents, and conversations related to topics concerning that specific channel. So, instead of getting distracted with some random email, or getting stuck in trying to clean up your inbox, you can maintain your focus on something more valuable, while spending your time on things that actually need your time and effort.

3. Amplified Transparency

Keeping everyone on the same page, while ensuring the fact that they are equally aware of what is going on in the project etc. has become quite a task for business organizations these days. But, not actually a challenge if you have MS Teams because it takes up all your stress of whom to add in cc of your email and who should be invited to the meeting. With MS Teams, all you need to do is to post your desired message in the relevant channel, and then simply mention people to whom you want to send notification. You can also leave the message for everyone else to read it and in this way you are amplifying the transparency, as the notification to the meeting would pop into everyone in the channel.

4. Seamless Migration/Shift To A Digital Workplace

In the modern-day digital corporate world, the benefits of moving to a digital workplace in the cloud are countless. As we know that MS Teams is an entirely cloud-based platform, moving to the cloud helps you attain a wide range of benefits. Using MS Teams allows you to access your data and information anytime, from anywhere in the world, by using any device, which is a great benefit, especially during the times when companies want to work smartly and remotely. Additionally, when you set you set up your workplace digitally in the cloud, you can also reap the perks of artificial intelligence and big data processing, to work in a better and smarter way. For instance, you can take advantage of auto multilingual conversation translations, especially if you work in a multilingual organization. Likewise, if you miss an important meeting, you can easily access the script of the meeting and watch video recordings if needed. There are various other benefits, these are just to name a few.

5. New Team Members Can Be Quickly Taken Onboard

In the modern agile corporate world, where you find and hire talent from anywhere in the world, it is imperative to get people quickly to the pace. With MS Teams, you can easily and very quickly get a new team member engaged to understand and adopt teamwork, regardless of the fact where they are located.

Disadvantages of Using Microsoft Teams

1. Transition From Outlook Is Difficult

One of the best ways to make the transition to MS Teams is to completely stop using Outlook and adopt Teams (for internal communication only). However, this is quite a challenge because Outlook is heavily dependent on Office 365. For instance, if you are editing any document and then want to send its sharing link to a team member, there is no such option to do so while using Teams Chat. All you can do is send the link via email. Also, MS Teams currently does not support Group Calendars; which means that if you want to see Group/Team Calendar, you have to switch back to Outlook.

2. Confusing File Saving Structure

When it comes to Generation Z and Millennials, they don’t really bother where the files are actually getting physically stored, because they instantly use the search option to retrieve whatever they need. However, there is still a group of users who want to know where the file is actually located and want to go through the entire folder structure to find it. So, when it comes to MS Teams for file storage, the structure is quite confusing. Because everything that got uploaded to the Teams conversation gets dumped into the channel root folder. And, if you start organizing these files with proper names, categories and try moving them into the properly named folder, then their links with the conversation get a break.

3. Online Meeting Experience Is Unfriendly That Hinders Adoption

Microsoft has been working really hard to integrate the functionalities of Skype into MS Teams and by far they are doing great by adding features that were not added to Teams before. However, their online meeting experience has not reached optimal, and the features are still not very intuitive and do not support capabilities such as it does not offer taking notes in OneNote. Users need to embrace online meetings to feel very comfortable while using the tool.

4. Permission Settings Are Challenging

Easy sharing is one of the biggest benefits of using MS Teams. Anyone using Teams gets automatic access to all the files and channels in the platform. This is amazing, but teamwork is always binary. Sometimes, you want to take permission setting more particular and differentiated, which is currently not possible with Teams. In Teams, you cannot create private channels for creating unique permission for any particular channel, and you also do not have the ability to invite users to any selected channels.

For instance, you want a consultant to be a part of your work team on one of your projects. And if you have a team related to customer projects with an engagement channel for each project, then your consultant would be seeing all the other projects, unless a private channel is made (which is usually not recommended by multiple limitations).

5. Restrained Flexibility Can Lead To Manual Duplications

When you start using Teams, you don’t have a structure that is ready to be used; you don’t have an understanding of which channels should be used. Or you don’t have an idea about what teams you need to create. This helps you progress in the work with time. Currently, the foundation of Teams is not flexible enough and you cannot move amid channels. This often leads to manual replications.

Summary

It is concluded that the disadvantages of the Teams are related to the software and Microsoft is addressing them very efficiently. Still, it is important to stay vigilant and provide proper guidance to the users, otherwise, you won’t be able to reap the benefits. It is not a question that how people change their way of doing work, it is about changing from one technology to another, and about the changing behavior of people. The benefits of using Teams are enormous and the disadvantages can be overcome by putting in enough effort and time.