Chicago Microsoft Teams / O365 Summit (September 2019)

On 24 September 2019 I attended a Microsoft Teams / Office 365 Summit. Organized by the vendor Harmon.ie and others, it was held in the MTC in Chicago. Some notes below for my own recall (“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now”).

 Agenda: https://pages.harmon.ie/SPSummit-Chicago-Sep2019-agenda.html

Frank Migacz of the Microsoft MTC provided a baseline overview of the Teams experience and how it can fit into and improve the collaboration, brainstorming, and knowledge preservation of organizations. His focus was on the baseline collaboration and meeting functionality workloads, with some incidental reference to telephony replacement.  Given the resources available, none of the fancier features (e.g. analog whiteboard integration, Teams room systems) were demonstrated.

 David Lavenda of Harmon.ie demonstrated their email/teams integration. Their product goal is to allow for reduction of the sprawl for conversations which cross from email (for external parties, e.g.) and Teams (for internal parties). In a nice touch, the presentation took on a picture book style, walking the audience through the basic functionality. Harmon.ie works as an Outlook or OWA plugin, allowing drag-and-drop integration to a selection of Teams (or Sharepoint); attachments and other objects are incorporated into the Teams message, the tool supports document classification (e.g. retention flags), etc. Licensing is per-user.

 Justin Walker discussed Avepoint's focus and guidance on Teams governance for successful deployments. Their product provides scaffolding for standardizing the rollout and request flow for teams/workspaces (including consulting services to initiate the process within an organization. The Avepoint product can provide its own Team request and management workflow, but also supports integration with ServiceNow - zero-install for cloud, on premises requires service engagement w/Avepoint

 Avepoint's solution allows for templating of Team creations - based on org hierarchy in Azure AD (assuming a clean AAD structure).

Coming from previous experience, I was particularly taken that Team and channel lifecycles were baked into the product, with time-based renewal of teams. In addition, the personal pain of orphan team management and notification is addressed in the tool. Ultimately this session fired the most neurons for me - though probably because this touched so many things I've done in the past.

 After the lunch break, John Hernandez of Nintex demonstrated their tool for process automation. This was a bit tricky to get a handle on - initially this seemed like a product that could be disrupted by Microsoft Flow or Zapier (as they use similar public APIs for a number of connected services, but as the demonstration worked forward some of the product's specific features - Visio workflow import, forms and multi-state approval steps, and significantly the ability to develop your own integrations to in-house applications - made it seem like a product for some areas.

 Evan Herbst of Harmon.ie provided a recent case study of a project Harmon.ie took on with the Hilton  group. Effectively, this was (after an incident) to resolve the volume of data they had retained - differentiating between compliance relevant documents (which must be preserved for a specific period), business records (which should be preserved for the furtherance of business) and non-essential emails which should be deleted. I'll want the slides to confirm, as I didn't capture in notes but something like 5% of email was business relevant, but some 80% of business records were persisted in email…. The work undertaken at Hilton was to clean and archive to Sharepoint those items which were to be carried forward, with the bulk of the work accelerated into a period of months. In a reflection of past life, 19000 PST files were deleted….

To close the day, there was a brief roundtable discussion - some interest in Microsoft's feature and PG input process of the Teams Uservoice voting vs small business input and how to gain better traction. A common theme was interest in how to get started in adoption and promotion  - pointers to docs.com's teams section and Tech Community's Driving Adoption group.

 All in all, a worthwhile day. And several opportunities to point participants to the Teams UG and our upcoming meeting on 3 October…