Forum Discussion
Global Move to Teams Only - August 19!
Allison Koch our cut over went AMAZING! Zero technical issues - and not many customer questions either! I have been getting lots of feedback on the change management plan and how well everyone feels like it went over! Today is our big excite day. We brought in a professional photographer to take profile pictures for everyone. We have cake (of course)! And tomorrow and thursday we are doing Teams Collaboration training sessions. Make sure you are working with your Microsoft account teams to take advantage of everything you can with them! We were able to get a budget through Microsoft to use for our event. I don't know what the criteria is to get this - but our account team submitted everything they could.
We are giving away prizes for anyone that participates in any of the events:
An extra vacation day
Lunch with our CEO
Tickets to a Pirates baseball game (the pirates do a blood drive and if you give blood you got free tickets - no one can say I'm not committed to our goal - I literally gave blood for it! )
Microsoft Surface Go
We hung signs in the bathrooms - in the stalls and by the paper towels. Amazing how many people commented on this and how it was the first time they noticed anything about the launch (aka didn't see it in their email). I guess when you have nothing else to focus on - it resonates! 🙂
My dog Stuart is our O365 mascot. We've done lots of things with live pictures of him - but for the launch we turned him into an animation. Worked great! We put him on balloons and stickers. People pay more attention to a cute puppy than they do to plain old boring text! Happy to discuss what we did with anyone interested in more information!
Our "Welcome To The Team" cake. The little squares are stickers or our mascot "Stuie" (my dog) we had madeWelcome to the Team!Our Pittsburgh Office Champions with our mascot StuieWe decorated our Champions' Desk with balloons. Everyone got a swag bag on their chairOur Microsoft Account team manning the "Ask Me Anything" desk"Ask Me Anything" desk
Allison Koch, what a great story! thanks a lot for sharing! I am happy everything ran smoothly!
I am wondering if you went through the Microsoft FastTrack program? I love your mascot. How did you animate the dog? Are your users creating teams by themselves? or do you have a process in order to do that?
Thanks,
Amelia
We talked to the Fast Track group for Teams but to be honest at least at the time we talked to them they weren't doing much but pointing us to the information that was available on line for change management in this space. I didn't see much they would offer that I couldn't get self service on my own.
We have a graphic designer that does contract work for us. She was the one that animated Stuie for me.
Yes we allow users to create Teams for themselves. We want to give people the ability to spin up an environment as they need to. We do have the expiration policy set though so they have to renew them once a year if they are inactive.
- Karuana_Gatimu_MSFT
Community Manager
Fantastic work to everyone on your team! Congatulations! I love seeing a technical and user adoption plan come to fruition. The first impression is critical! Allison Koch
