We certainly are living in interesting times.  I write this post in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.  We are seeing organizations rapidly adopting technology to keep operating remotely.  In this rush, firms are making some very quick decisions and are often overlooking their normal processes.

I hate tool sprawl.  In MAD projects, wherever we can, the focus should be on consolidating systems.  In general, this means migrating into one system if you can, as soon as possible.  If you do not do this, one day you will wake up and have 5 tools for the same solution.  This is not only expensive in the long term,but it amplifies security risk,and can ruin user productivity.

This debate covers both MAD and non-MAD scenarios.  Having two conferencing solutions was, and still is, common place.  But is it time to change this?

History

For years many of us had an internal solution and external solution for conferencing.  For internal, we would use Skype/Teams and for external, we would use another provider.  Not everyone in the company had the external need, but anyone external facing had this second product.  This was done for good reason.  Often external people could not seem to join our Skype and Team meetings.  We all knew it should work, but at the same time, we didn’t want to create potential barriers to business.  Losing 10 minutes in a sales pitch to get everyone into a Skype bridge was just not good for business.

The Issues

The answer to “what should I do” is always going to differ from company to company.  However, let me suggest a few topics to consider.  At the end of the day, having everything in one system has huge advantages for both costs and productivity.  However, if it does not meet all your business needs, you may need to continue using multiple tools for either all or some of your users.

Scope the Issue

Just like all MAD projects, you need data.  Pull reports and understand how your users are using things. Depending on your type of contract and service, you may have an audio provider in addition to your web conferencing solution, and they integrate. 

You may need to run reports in several locations and compare them with other data points to understand this problem.  However, you will not be able to answer these questions without scoping your current state correctly.  At the end of this process, you need to have a good handle on your internal vs external users and what services are being used.

Integration

There is no denying this; Teams is slick.  The way it integrates with everything is amazing.  This combined productivity is a huge plus for using Teams for all conferencing needs.

Note: The multi-tenant process is problematic!  However, for general conferences, most people will not have this worry or need.

Dial-In Numbers

Do you do business in one country, a few, or all over the globe?  Do you use dial out a lot?  If you only do business in a limited number of countries, and you have support in Teams for these regions, then Teams can likely meet your needs for audio dial in.  If you do a lot of audio only conferencing externally, this will be important for you to analyze and understand. Otherwise you couldrisk interrupting some business if you don’t understand your footprint correctly.

Video

The UI experience, quality of video, and amount of active video streams on a screen can change from solution to solution.  I expect to see parity rapidly here, but this is the one item Teams really lacks.  Tony Redmond wrote a great post a few weeks ago that covers this sub topic very well: https://www.petri.com/teams-video-view-improvement-needed

If your company does a lot of video calls, this may be a bigger issue for you.  Engrained experiences are difficult to change.

External Demographics

For years, we all had WebEx or Zoom because other companies didn’t have Teams and/or Skype.  Skype just never really worked well for external meetings.  With the massive adoption of Teams most people have the agent now.  This includes companies directly using it, or the external party having the client already installed from other meetings. 

With the COVID-19 pandemic, there was massive adoption of Teams.  Thus, this issue, which in my mind was the major issue and barrier to an “all Teams” strategy, is highly mitigated.  Most participants will not see this as a barrier now.

Business Continuity Planning

Regardless of your solution, you need a backup plan.  What if Azure AD has another MFA outage?  What if Teams goes down?  These outages are going to happen, hopefully less and less, but everyone needs a backup plan.

For most companies it may make more sense for you to shrink these offerings down to only a few people in the company for these BCP situations.

Summary

So, what’s the end result? With the rapid change in usage, companies using Microsoft Teams may now be able to consider consolidating towards this one central solution.  For many, today is that day.