Getting Started with Microsoft Teams

IT Admins

Microsoft Teams makes it easier to work together and get things done by bringing together group
chat, content, and everyday tools in an open, informal team environment.

Welcome, we’re glad you’re here!

Use this guide to help you plan, implement, and adopt Microsoft Teams in your organization. This
guide focuses on enabling collaboration and team communications scenarios. To implement Teams
enterprise voice features, check out our Cloud voice documentation.

It’s easy to get started!

Roll out Microsoft Teams across your organization by following the steps outlined in this guide. It
includes all the resources you need to be successful.

1. Get your people together

2. Prioritize your business scenarios

3. Complete technical planning

4. Launch pilot teams and deploy broadly

5. Measure usage, manage satisfaction and drive adoption

 Getting Started with Microsoft Teams
IT Admins

You can also take advantage of our FastTrack service for personalized remote assistance in rolling out
Microsoft Teams. Go to FastTrack

Join the Microsoft Teams Tech Community to discover and share best practices and tips with other IT Pros.

https://aka.ms/TeamsTechCommunity
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IT Admins

1. Get your people together

Assemble a group of individuals from your business, IT, and user communities to act as the
stakeholder and decision-making group for your Teams deployment. In smaller organizations, this
may be two or three people. Be sure to include individuals from all three communities to ensure a
successful journey.

Each group will bring key skills to the table though there is cross over between these generalizations.
IT professionals will often focus on the health, security and manageability of the experience while
ensuring you have end to end cohesion across all your Office 365 services. Business users will bring
practical scenarios and business needs that provide valuable test cases. Both perspectives are
required to enable a successful test and broad deployment plan.

2. Prioritize your business scenarios

Collaboration and communication is about people! Pick the most relevant business scenarios for
your organization instead of talking about features and functions. Check out the Microsoft 365
FastTrack Productivity Library for examples to help you define scenarios for your company.
Successful Teams deployments often center around high-velocity teams that work closely
together, such as product development, marketing event teams, finance groups, or support
organizations. Select one of these scenarios and complete a quick inventory of how these users
work today so you can effectively design the Teams experience in a meaningful way for these
people.
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IT Admins

🏆 Best practice:

Plan Teams with Teams! Customers who use Teams to plan their deployment ease the
change curve for key stakeholders. Consider creating a team called Microsoft 365
Deployment and creating channels for the various workloads you want to deploy. Your team
might look something like this:

Watch this short video with simple guidance to consider when planning your teams, channels and
tabs in Microsoft Teams.

If Microsoft Teams is not enabled in your Office 365 tenant and you are an Office 365 administrator
follow the instructions in our article Set up Microsoft Teams in your Office 365 organization to ensure
your users have access to the application.

3. Complete Technical Planning

Efficient technical planning is the foundation of a great user experience. If your organization has
more than 50 seats and is participating in an eligible plan, you can use FastTrack benefits,
available at no additional cost to guide you through planning, deployment and service adoption.
Or, you can complete this work yourself using our FastTrack Onboarding Wizards, available from
FastTrack once you sign in with your Office 365 account. The information below will help you
complete this step for Teams. At a minimum, you’ll want to review these four articles:
 Getting Started with Microsoft Teams
IT Admins

1. Check your environment's readiness for Teams

2. Prepare your network for Teams
3. Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges
4. Guest access in Teams

In addition, certain organizations may want to review the overview of security and compliance in
Teams.

4. Conduct pilots and deploy Teams

In most organizations, you’ll want to conduct an initial Teams pilot with your stakeholders,
champions, and early adopters for one or more of the scenarios you selected above. A pilot gives
you valuable information about how Office 365 and Teams are received in your organization. Select
an interested group of users and a prioritized business scenario to get started. Figure 2 shows some
example scenarios.
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IT Admins

Once your pilots are complete, you’ll have the feedback you need to plan your broad Teams
deployment. Large organizations often deploy in phases to manage the onboarding and training
work required to implement a quality employee experience. Be sure your deployment plan integrates
your prioritized business scenarios to ensure your employees are getting the most from Office 365
and Teams.

🏆 Best practice:

In smaller organizations (currently fewer than 2500 users), consider enabling Teams for the entire
organization, then add all users to a single, company-wide team. Add common reference items
and tasks to this team to simplify the collaboration and productivity experience for everyone.

If you use Yammer for broad company collaboration, consider integrating Yammer into the Teams
experience. This doesn’t replace the native browser or mobile experience for Yammer but provides
an integrated way to stay up-to-date on topics of broad interest across your organization. To learn
more, watch [Tech Tip: Community management for Yammer with Microsoft Teams.

Don’t forget mobile!

As you’re deploying Teams, don’t forget to turn on the mobile experience. Enabling your users to run
Office 365 mobile applications can dramatically increase usage and satisfaction. Office, Outlook,
SharePoint, Teams, Planner, Yammer, and other popular Office 365 services all offer mobile
experiences. As a best practice, [turn on the Teams mobile experience at the same time as you
deploy the desktop and browser clients.

5. Measure usage, manage satisfaction, and drive adoption

Deploying software is not the only thing required to drive change in your organization. Empowering
collaboration is more about people than technology. To successfully drive adoption of Office 365 and
Teams, stay focused on your employees’ experience. Here’s a quick checklist of our best practices to
get you started. Microsoft partners can also help you design the right adoption plan for your
organization.
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IT Admins

1. Read Office 365 Adoption Guidance for best practices. Use our article on creating a
change management strategy for Microsoft Team to document your approach.

2. Study Office 365 activity reports to understand usage across your environment. If you
aren’t an Office 365 admin for your company, ask your admin to give you Reports Reader
permissions so you can access activity reports.

3. Capture feedback from your employees on their experience with Office 365 and Teams.
Use a public channel in Teams when your organization has fewer than 2500 individuals.
Use a public group in Yammer when your organization is larger than this current
membership limit in Teams.

4. Nurture your champions and highlight your wins. Reward employees for embracing these
new tools and using them in innovative ways that relate to business outcomes for your
company. This, above anything, will ensure continued adoption of Office 365 and Teams.

Next steps

1. Head over to the Workshop kit: Plan, deliver, and operate Teams

2. Download and fill out the technical planning questionnaire in the Quick start guide:
Successfully enable Teams.

3. Download the workshop for launching Teams in your organization: Plan, Deliver, &
Operate Teams

Enable Innovation

Collaborate with champions across the organization to identify advanced use cases, including custom
integrations and bots to make the most of Microsoft Teams. Consider creating a team for Microsoft
Teams champions across the organization to share ideas that will transform the way their teams work
together. Share Microsoft Teams feedback via the User Voice or via the in-product Feedback link.
Engage with other IT Pros in the Microsoft Teams Tech Community.