Global Move to Teams Only - August 19!

Iron Contributor

We are moving our entire company to Teams Only mode on August 19th!

 

Wish Stuie (our O365 mascot and my dog) and I good luck!

Also if you didn't see our video featuring our Iceland facility - please check it out!  Very proud of the work we have done there - and incredibly honored to have been featured during Satya's corenote - https://youtu.be/HMz0U-1bAec

 

clipboard_image_0.png

How Alcoa is using the power of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to empower their employees at a factory in Iceland. Subscribe to Microsoft on YouTube here: https://aka.ms/SubscribeToYouTube Follow us on social: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/ Twitter: ...
11 Replies
Dear Allison,

Are you moving from Islands Mode to Teams Only? or did you guys set a mode in between like SfB w/Teams Collab?

Thanks for sharing such a great video! It is motivating and inspiring! I am looking forward to reading your contributions about your experiences after August 19. We are planing a similar step early next year. Great step! I wish you the best! :)

@Amelia_Hdez we set everyone to SkypeOnlyWCollab.  We had issues being in Islands mode.  We had people using Teams for collaboration but our main communication area was still Skype. People were missing IM's because they were going to Teams instead of Skype and because they weren't necessarily in Teams all the time they would miss the message - but would get an email they had missed it.  Was very confusing for our users.  Microsoft recommended to us we should be in one bucket or the other - Skype or Teams - for communications.  We set that early this year.

 

We moved our early adopters to TeamsOnly in April - about 1200 people - including all of IT - about 800 - and the remaining users a mix of volunteers from the business.  We then added our entire Iceland location in May - another 500 people - as an extension of our pilot.  July we added our entire South America region - another 2900 people - as our final extension of our pilot.  We made the decision we would move everyone else in one shot - although we continued to take volunteers to move earlier.  We only moved people in batches on Fridays.  We found that replication of the change definitely takes 24 - 48 hours and doing it on the weekend was best.  Especially since we were not in Islands mode - if we didn't do that people were without Skype and Teams for chat while they waited for everything to replicate.

 

We found we had about 7000 accounts that had either never used Skype at all - or hadn't used it in the last 2 years.  We went ahead and moved those to TeamsOnly the end of July.  If they never used Skype - the move to Teams wouldn't be an issue for them.  We wanted to do this to ensure we had as few accounts as possible to replicate the change.

 

Our final count of users to move in our "Big Bang" is 5,184. 

@Allison Koch Congratulations!  We too are moving strictly to Teams on September 9, 2019. We have over 5,000 users - most are utilizing Skype for Business, which we are shutting down completely.

 

Good luck!

 

J

Hi @Allison Koch

Thanks a lot for sharing your journey!

 

My greatest take-out is the one about checking out the accounts that had either never used Skype at all -or hadn't used it in the last x years. We certainly did something similar lately -but for another purpose, not Teams adoption-, in that case we selected those accounts using Skype actively. It was not easy to get them though, but worth. 

 

Regarding the island mode, this is the same feedback we have from our pilot users so far. We have not tried the "Skype with Team Collab" mode yet. It is for sure worth a try! 

 

@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 madeOur "Welcome To The Team" cake. The little squares are stickers or our mascot "Stuie" (my dog) we had madeWelcome to the Team!Welcome to the Team!Our Pittsburgh Office Champions with our mascot StuieOur Pittsburgh Office Champions with our mascot StuieWe decorated our Champions' Desk with balloons.  Everyone got a swag bag on their chairWe decorated our Champions' Desk with balloons. Everyone got a swag bag on their chairOur Microsoft Account team manning the "Ask Me Anything" deskOur Microsoft Account team manning the "Ask Me Anything" desk"Ask Me Anything" desk"Ask Me Anything" desk

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 

@Allison Koch  thanks for sharing your story. We have had Teams in our business for a while but, because it wasn't launched properly our uptake is terrible. I'm part of a team set to change that! Seeing your Iceland video was very inspiring because many of our colleagues don't have easy access to a PC. I'm going to show the video in demos as it really proves that Teams is for everyone! 

@Janice Headrick 

Hi Janice,

You are completely shuting down Skype? How do you handle when users receive SfB meetings requests? 

Thanks

Alex

@Alexandre GRANADO for us we are telling them to use the skype web interface

@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.