Microsoft Teams Advisor is a new feature available in the Microsoft Teams Admin center tailored to provide readiness in your journey to deploy Microsoft Teams in your environment. Enabling this feature will run a tenant configuration assessment to highlight potential issue and create a collaborative space for your deployment team inside Microsoft Teams.
Currently Microsoft Teams Advisor is divided into two workloads:
-A collaboration plan called “Chat, teams, channels and apps”
-A conferencing plan called “Meetings and Conferencing”
Tenant configuration assessment
Collaborative space for your deployment team
How to enable Microsoft Teams Advisor?
What to expect from this feature?
Tenant configuration assessment
When you enable the advisor, the tenant assessment will run a configuration check of your tenant in the background. This assessment will highlight aspects of your environment that may require remediation.
You can view the result of those assessments by clicking on the “view all” button attached to each workloads :
Chat, teams, channels and app Assessment
Meetings and conferencing
Assessment
This feature is designed to warn you on high-level configuration or licensing aspects that may interfere with user experience. As an example, the guest access allows external users to be invited in your Teams. You can still use Microsoft Teams without this feature but the assessment will warn you so that you are aware something could be configured to invite external users to your Teams.
In the official Microsoft Docs page, you can find the description of each elements of these assessments.
Collaborative space for your deployment team
Microsoft Teams Advisor will also create a team inside Microsoft Teams where you will find the general channel and a channel for each workload you selected. Your team will then be able to collaborate with chat and file inside those channels. In addition, your deployment team can take advantage of a planner with provisioned tasks and a Microsoft Forms survey to customize to get feedback from your users.
Note that you can choose one workload and the second one after without any limitation.
If you choose the two workloads, your teams will look like this:
For each workload channel, you will find extra tabs for tasks related to the workload and a survey template to gather feedback from users:
Let’s first look at the planner tab:
As you can see, tasks are regrouped into buckets and provide insights with a description.
By clicking on a task, you will find extra information to help you understand it. Depending on the task, you can find bullet pointed sub tasks and documentation to understand what as to be performed:
Let’s now look at the survey:
Note that this is a general satisfaction survey. You will find the same template attached to both workloads. You still can modify it and make two different survey for the two workloads.
This survey template shows how to leverage a wide range of question types like rating, choices… You can personalize the survey by clicking on the item you want to modify and add extra questions by clicking “Add new”.
How to enable Microsoft Teams Advisor?
The first thing to do is to navigate to the Microsoft Teams admin center and select planning > Teams advisor from the left navigation menu. From this interface you will be guided to choose one or the two workloads (Collaboration / Conference) and set up your deployment team.
At the end of the process, a new team will be created for your deployment team in Microsoft Teams. The next step will be to check the assessment of your tenant for the selected workload. This assessment will highlight potential issue to fix at the beginning of your journey to Microsoft Teams.
What to expect from this feature?
The benefits while using this feature are multiple:
One side is to gain visibility on the tasks to perform to successfully deploy Microsoft Teams in your organization. Once the team created, you can add participants and start assigning tasks to your deployment team.
By using this feature, you ensure your deployment team become familiar with Microsoft Teams straight from the beginning.
Once created, this team is fully customizable. Meaning the team is provisioned with one or two channels (depending on the workloads you selected). You can create other channels if needed, add or remove members, leverage planner to add new tasks or edit the existing ones (adding other bullet point sub tasks for instance…)
While updating the status of the planner tasks, you will see progression percentage increase from the workload section of the Teams admin center. This way you can get an overview of the deployment progression from the admin center:
I hope you found relevant information to help you deploy successfully Microsoft Teams in your organization.
See you soon in the blog section 😎
