If you are looking for the best collaboration tool for your employees, you may come across the name Microsoft teams. It is one of the best collaboration tools that allow you to use multiple forms of communication on a single platform.
In traditional collaboration, teams meet up in person, have phone calls, or send emails. But now, most businesses use unified communication tools that provide a shared space, reduce holding times and make teams more productive and efficient.
Microsoft teams is also a unified communication tool that comes free with all Office 365 subscriptions. It has advanced features, which is why businesses replace skype with Microsoft teams. It aims to help businesses and their teams to communicate efficiently.
Microsoft designed this software to offer a solution for every kind of collaborative group, including small to medium-sized businesses in a wide range of sectors.
In This Article
With unified communication tools like 'Teams' you can get several benefits: improve productivity, boost employee engagement, empower flexible working and increase efficiency. In this article, we will describe the pros and cons of Microsoft teams so that you can decide whether it is suitable for your business or not. But first, let's understand what unified communication is.
What Is Unified Communication?
Unified communication evolved from the need of businesses to be more efficient and flexible in communicating with their suppliers, internal staff and customers.
After the pandemic, remote working is rising and empowers users to work from anywhere. Similarly, mobile devices are becoming essential to the corporate network to keep workers productive anywhere.
In simple words, unified communication means you can communicate with your employees, clients and customers using multiple communication channels using one seamless application, which ultimately increases the efficiency and productivity of the business.
A typical unified communication tool is an application. Still, from that application, you can make voice calls and video calls, send and receive instant messages, and share documents internally or externally.
Unified communication is revolutionizing how businesses operate and allowing small and medium-sized businesses to have an advantage over their large competitors.
Key Components Of Microsoft Teams
In order to evaluate Microsoft teams’ benefits and drawbacks, first, you need to understand its key components:
1. Teams
The use of this communication tool starts with creating a team. You can use an existing Microsoft 365 group or choose a template to move things faster. Then invite people you want to collaborate with. You can make separate teams for different departments, such as product, marketing, or customer care.
However, in some situations, you may also need to partner with people outside your organization, such as consultants or freelancers. One good thing about Teams is that you can add guest users to it.
2. Channels
Basically, channels show your conversations with different people inside or outside your organisation. You can create channels around a team, topic or project. Channels are the place where you can add files, chat with each other and hold meetings.
3. Tabs
Tabs help you navigate through the content in your channel. By default, there are three tabs named posts, files and Wiki. The post tab stores all the chats you have within one channel, the files tab stores all the shared documents within a channel, and the Wiki tab is like a smart text editor where you can edit notes, draft and chat. You can also add more tabs if you want.
Pros Of Microsoft Teams
Although Teams is a great tool that is becoming better day after day, it may still lack certain functionalities. Here are some of the disadvantages of Microsoft Teams that we come across while using the app.
Many Similar Tools
The major obstacle for Microsoft Teams is, surprisingly, the other Microsoft tools. With a number of options, users get confused about which type of tool they should use in which condition.
Thus it is the responsibility of Microsoft to educate their users about the use of all tools and make them familiar with popular Microsoft 365 apps.
Unnecessary Storage Consumption
Microsoft Teams default allows everybody in your organisation to create a team. It may result in unnecessary team creation that fills the storage space. However, a feature allows you to restrict team creation permission to specific users, but doing so requires some handiwork.
First, you need to create a separate security group of people whom you want to allow to create teams and then run some Power shell commands.
Security Risk
As described in the above section, everybody can create a team by default. On the one hand, where it helps to increase collaboration, it also increases security. Guest users can add malicious files in channels that may contain viruses or any harmful data for your organization.
Employees may also upload files containing confidential data. Unmanaged devices from outside your organization may connect to Teams and steal data within channels.
All these risks can be mitigated, but you need resources to implement and manage the related controls, permissions and authentication.
Limited Flexibility
Every time you create a new team using this app, you start a new structure from scratch. Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams does not offer any option like replicating the structure of a team.
For example, you can not move any channel or replicate it to another Team. You must do it manually if you need to replicate any team. It may take a longer time.
Even though Teams make information sharing easy, it is tricky to change permission settings. It is also a reason that Microsoft Teams lack flexibility for some types of users.
Lack Of Notifications
When you try to make the team with a name that already exists, you will not get any notification about it. This way, you end up having two or more teams with the same name, which will create confusion.
You must work around to avoid such a situation by entering the Team’sTeam’s name in the search bar before creating a team. It will show existing teams’ names and help you avoid duplicating them.
Limited Number Of Channels
The number of channels that you can create on Microsoft Teams is limited to 200 public and 30 private channels per TeamTeam. It may not be a problem if you own a small organisation, but others may find themselves in a tight spot.
If you reach this limit, you have to delete some channels to create new ones. However, the shared files of all the channels remain as backup storage in SharePoint even if you delete a channel.
Bottom Line
You may find a hundred unified communication apps, but Microsoft Teams is a well-known app headed by a well-known brand 'Microsoft'. A large number of small, medium and large businesses are using it because of its benefits, such as increased productivity, access to other Microsoft tools and easy collaboration with employees, clients and customers. However, Teams also have some drawbacks that you should always keep in mind. We suggest you have a detailed look at the pros and cons of Microsoft teams so that you can decide if it meets your business needs or not.
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