In this week’s episode, we spent time with the team from Microsoft’s Core Services Engineering Organisation – otherwise known as Microsoft IT, supporting the 200,000+ users within Microsoft from not only technical backgrounds but sales, marketing, HR, finance, retail and many of the similar roles you’ll find in any company.

Joining us on the show are Petra Thomas, Emily Kirby and Lesley Montgomery – all working as Program Managers at Microsoft and responsible for performing what many organisations are looking to do today – move from either Skype for Business Only or Islands mode to a pure Teams Only mode. Having done this across such a diverse (and demanding) global environment we thought it would be really interesting to hear what they encountered along the way, how they approached it, what worked well and what we can learn from their experience.

Our show notes from today’s episode:

• For the benefit of people listening – what are Teams Modes – primarily Islands Mode vs Teams Mode
• And – what’s best – Teams Mode?
• Tell us about the challenge Microsoft had with moving to Teams
  • Where they were coming from
  • What they were already using
  • Different types of users
  • Different roles
  • How to know who to move and when?
• What were the technical challenges?
  • Federation?
  • Meeting rooms?
  • Surface Hubs?
  • Phones?
  • Devices?
  • Connectivity?
  • Client readiness?
• Moving (100,000+?) employees to Teams Only seems a big undertaking – how did you plan and approach it – and what can we learn from that?

You’ll find Episode 36 above, and at our podcast site, on iTunes,Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher, Google podcasts and you can subscribe with your favourite podcast app using the feed. If you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the next shows, let us know.