Summary of Microsoft Teams Webinar Series, Part 2
In early 2020, ILTA and Microsoft delivered an eight-part Webinar series focused on Microsoft Teams. These eight sessions were among our most popular educational programs for 2020. Consequently, we worked with Microsoft to develop a second Teams series, taking a deeper dive on some of the topics with the greatest attendance and most questions.
Our second series ran in late 2021 and early 2022. The topics were as follows:
Those eight sessions went by fast!
A huge thanks to the Microsoft team who presented at these sessions – especially to Michelle Gilbert and Paul Edlund of Microsoft’s legal vertical v-team!
Several themes emerged through the course of these sessions.
First, most organizations saw fast adoption by lawyers and staff – faster than expected for any app, much less a cloud-based one. This turned out to be a double-edged sword – quick productivity but also the need to figure out quickly where Teams fit in the overall tech stack as well as in the document and matter management tech stack.
Second, firms are still struggling to adapt to how lawyers want to use Teams. In most instances, the immediate goal of Teams (first quarter of 2020) was direct messaging for a remote workforce. However, user quickly began pressing for external collaboration, document sharing, and matter management.
Third, firms – especially those with less well evolved cloud strategies – needed to work to manage credentialing, security, tenant settings, and other brave new world aspects of cloud application management.
Fourth, organizations are seeking ways to leverage their existing Microsoft spend and licensing in new ways. This requires a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of both core licensing programs and “bolt-on” licensing options.
Fifth, we appear to be in a period of unprecedented flexibility with respect to voice (including video). The “don’t mess with my dialtone” attitude of the past – as well as a traditional resistance to video conferencing – has changed more rapidly than probably anyone could have predicted. Users are seeing the benefits of platforms that offer voice and video along with direct messaging and other kinds of collaboration.
Sixth, the period of forgiveness we experienced in the early days of the pandemic – where we could bend some rules around security and information governance – are long gone. Our information governance policies and practices are undergoing rapid evolution to adapt to the hybrid workplace and hybrid application stack.
Finally, we learned that there might be as many ways of using Teams as we have lawyers in our organizations. Therefore, continuing to explore real world use cases and comparing notes about requests and lessons learned will be integral to our success going forward.
The above is a very high-level synopsis of some of the key issues we explored.
So, are we done with Teams content? Absolutely not. Registration will soon open for our two-day Teams event, scheduled for May 4/5. The topics for that event are as follows:
- What We Wish We’d Known about Teams When we Started
- Mastering Teams in a Matter Management Environment: Lessons Learned and Best Practices
- Mastering Document Management in a Teams Environment: Lessons Learned and Best Practices
- Future Proofing Microsoft Teams
Finally, we are planning our next deep dive Webinar series on Teams. Topics under consideration include the following:
- Key Management: A Deep Dive
- Managing Unscheduled Down Time
- Co-Authoring in Teams
- Everything You Wanted to Know about Tasks and Teams
- Leveraging Cortana in Teams
If there are other topics you would like us to consider, please let us know.
We hope you are enjoying this Microsoft programming!
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