Over the past two years we’ve helped thousands of organizations transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams and realize new possibilities for workplace communication and collaboration. We’v...
Updated Jan 26, 2021
Version 4.0
Blog Post
If you have technical users, expect pushback.
- Technical users will likely already have set up their own communication channels that work well for them. Moving to Teams will be seen as a downgrade.
- Technical users expect a high degree of control over their UI experience. Teams has very little in the way of meaningful configuration or customization options. You can't even choose the font, for example, which apart from anything else is an accessibility issue.
- Technical users want to discuss their work, which means having a chat window open as well as their work. The chat is nowhere near compact enough for this to work. Expect a bill for new monitors.
- Teams Only is simply not possible. Even internally, expect to support multiple communication systems. Are you sure all your customers are on Teams? And all your potential customers?
- Invite your local Microsoft Teams representative in for a feedback session. Schedule time for a couple of representatives from the users to talk to them, face to face. Get a commitment to address the issues raised.
- Expect frustration with the opaque development process. UserVoice tickets rarely get updated, commonly languish in "working on it" state for years with zero evidence of actual work, or are closed as "complete" when half-implemented, effectively dumping all the votes they have accrued in the bin, and preventing effective feedback. Is this by design? It certainly looks that way.
- Expect your users to get frustrated enough with the lack of progress on simple, basic UI features that they spill out from Uservoice (where users can complain in private without bothering potential customers) and spill out onto public-facing blogs to try to make their issues more visible. That's why I'm here.