The Microsoft Teams Premium add-on license launched a year ago, unlocking advanced capabilities to help make your team’s collaboration more intelligent, engaging, and secure. As we approach this first anniversary, we want to share a playbook of best practices that we’ve created based on feedback and learnings from our customers. This playbook is designed to help you roll out Teams Premium gradually and efficiently and support you in driving user adoption and maximizing the value of your investment to achieve your business goals.
Designed to help you successfully get started on your readiness and adoption journey, we’ve curated this four-stage process with guidance and the tools you’ll need.
- Get familiar with Teams Premium
- Set up the features - Operational Enablement
- Strategize users’ assignment
- Share with your users
Explore the 4 stages of your Teams Premium adoption journey
1. Get familiar with Teams Premium
Begin by deepening your understanding of Teams Premium. Explore its capabilities, features, and the benefits it offers to your organization. Explore the available training options if needed, such as the Customer Hub sessions we offer, and if you have a Microsoft Unified contract, contact your Microsoft Account Representative to discuss the Unified Enhanced Solutions available for Teams Premium.
Explore more on the Teams Premium features.
2. Set up the features - Operational enablement
In this phase, focus on the technical setup and ensure that Teams Premium is correctly configured for your organization's needs. This includes handling internal approvals, enabling and setting feature policies, templates, and branding. The deployment guide will be the best asset to assist you in this phase.
The deployment guide will cover the following for each feature:
- Introduction and benefits
- Feature Visibility
- Use Case(s)
- Additional roles are needed (e.g. people you should pull in to confirm or enable)
- Prerequisites
- Dependencies and limitations (e.g. supported / platforms, images sizes, etc.)
- Enablement and end user adoption guidance – step by step instructions for successful setting of the feature.
3. Strategize users’ assignments
Develop a strategy to determine which users or departments will benefit the most from Teams Premium and plan your rollout accordingly. The options for user assignments are as follows:
- Start with early adopters and Champions who can promote and support Teams Premium.
- Mass Assignments: By enabling a large portion, or all your employees, to access Teams Premium capabilities, you can test user’s reactions at a large scale. This approach requires purchasing mass licenses that equip all your users with advanced capabilities, leveraging a broad scale of reaction and feedback.
- Gradual Assignment by Communities, Lines of Business, Departments, User Personas, or Use Cases: This method allows for the testing of specific capabilities that best fit the needs of communities. You can adjust Teams Premium access for only those users who need it and gradually scale according to the feedback.
To identify features applicable to your users, we recommend starting your analysis with 'Persona Mapping'. This approach helps in assigning features to users and onboarding them to Teams Premium with an understanding of key personas and use cases. Ensuring representation across different business units and geographies, as well as diversity in user types and roles, may provide a better mapping of users' needs and reactions to the features. This will help validate that the assignment strategy chosen captures the right users who will benefit most from the package.
We suggest defining relevant communities and maximizing the number of users in each to identify the most influencer-rich communities. This encourages further engagement among users and creates communities with a clearly identified hero feature for engagement.
You can find more on Personna Mapping in the adoption kit.
4. Share with your users
Now it is time to make users aware of the new capabilities available for them. You can utilize a variety of various existing channels for this purpose:
- Internal communications: Leverage newsletters, social platforms, briefing videos, webinars, and meetings.
- Executive sponsorship: Have leaders promote the initiative.
- Self-serve resources: Share resources like the User Guide to provide detailed step-by-step instructions for each feature
- Engagement Initiatives: Host launch webinars and ad-hoc training sessions.
- Foster Open Dialogue: Encourage feedback and discussions among users.
To avoid overwhelming users, we recommend pinpointing a few “hero” features that resonate most with your organization's needs and focusing on those. A popular hero feature is intelligent recap; a true game-changer in how users consume meeting content.
Suggested communication for your users can be:
User's 'How to' for intelligent recap
We organized our recommended communications in the adoption kit, as well as video playlists to approach it simply. You can check out the Business User playlist and the IT Pro playlist on our Teams Premium adoption site. Here’s an example of communication to promote enhanced security and the ‘Watermarking’ capability:
User's how to video for watermarking
And another for the ‘Engagement Analytics feature:
All these assets and more can be found on our new Teams Premium adoption site.
The assets are available to you as the essential tools for this journey. It's designed to help you engage users effectively and foster a smooth adoption process.
As we navigate these exciting times in collaborative technology, your role is pivotal in driving successful adoption. With the right tools and strategies, you can ensure that your team not only adopts Teams Premium but also thrives using it.
We’re excited to see how you leverage Teams Premium to its fullest potential. Share your experiences, challenges, and successes in the comments section below.