Peter Rising - Managing Microsoft Teams: MS-700 Exam Guide

Configure and manage Microsoft Teams workloads and achieve Microsoft 365 certification with ease

Peter Rising

Nate Chamberlain

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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To my amazing wife, Louise, and my incredible sons, George and Oliver. I'm so proud of you all and grateful for the strength you give me in very uncertain times in the world. I love you all dearly.

Peter Rising

To my parents, Pam and Calvin Chamberlain, for their examples of bravery, love, and determination that have inspired me to rise to any challenge life brings. I'm proud to be their son.

Nate Chamberlain

Microsoft Teams is important

As the fastest-growing app in Microsoft history, Microsoft considers Teams so important that in a recent interview with the Financial Times, Satya Nadella said that Teams will become a "digital platform as significant as the internet browser." It's yet another accolade in an incredible story for an app that by the time this book is published will only be 4 years old. Having entered general availability in the spring of 2017 after it was developed in an internal hackathon, Teams is a converged application, bringing together communication and collaboration workloads such as chats, meetings, calling, and apps. It has won Enterprise Connect twice. It is now used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. It is available in over 180 markets and supports over 50 languages. Today, we know that the global Daily Active Usage (DAU) is somewhere north of 115 million. Back in July 2019 when Microsoft announced that Teams had overtaken Slack in terms of usage at Microsoft Inspire, the DAU stood at only 13 million.

So, this raises the million-dollar question: what has fueled the growth of Microsoft Teams since the latter half of 2019? What has caused this explosion in usage? All things considered, the principal factor driving its usage has undoubtedly been Covid-19. As the pandemic has spread across borders and over continents, organizations of every type in every vertical in every country have needed to adapt to a new way of working to survive or function. Life as we know it has changed. With the shift of many organizations to operating remotely, Teams has been key in helping them achieve continuity and resilience while allowing people to stay in touch. Students can still go to school and both learn and interact with their teachers. Patients can still see their doctors for a consult. By bringing together the tools we need to work effectively and the means to communicate seamlessly with others, Teams has helped many of us be just as productive as before or sometimes even more productive.

Yet even though Covid brought what Microsoft considered to be "2 years of digital transformation in 2 months," it hasn't been the only reason for Teams' growth. Firstly, the rapid rate of innovation in Teams, where Microsoft has listened extensively to users and loaded its development assets into the product, has led to a continuous stream of new features that has refined Teams at an amazing pace.

Private channels, custom backgrounds, shared system audio, Together mode, Large Gallery view, policy packages, tighter integration with SharePoint, tighter integration with the Power Platform, the introduction of Teams on Linux, and Skype consumer interop are just some of these features. Even the small additions that backfill Skype for Business functionality, such as Longest Idle, Busy on Busy, and Simultaneous Ring, keep on increasing Teams' value. Secondly, Microsoft has worked hard the last few years on the extensibility of Teams.

Now supporting an ecosystem of over 800 store applications, any organization can build upon the out-of-the-box functionality and customize Teams to suit their needs. Having broadened the extensibility surface to include channels, chat, UI components, and even meetings, organizations can develop their own apps, bots, or messaging extensions, or even connect Teams to third-party apps they have already invested in via connectors and webhooks. They can do so using a full-code approach with their own tools or SPFX, or they can do so using a low-code or no-code approach with the Power Platform.

When organizations begin to use Teams as a base upon which other applications are developed, accessed, and surfaced, it is what we call "Teams as a Platform." This is the digital platform to which Satya refers: bringing what you need into one space, enabling continuity of workflow across apps, and enabling the accessing of apps from anywhere on any device, benefitting all workers, including those in frontline roles. It is a new phase for Teams that will see it go beyond simply being a communications and collaboration app to being an app that looks more like an operating system such as Windows.

Finally, the growth of Teams has happened because overall, Teams is very user-friendly. In addition to resonating with and appealing to how users aspire to work in the modern age, it is a great way to access and adopt the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack, increasing the return for organizations that have chosen to invest in it. When you have a conversation on Teams, you are leveraging Exchange Online. When you upload a file to Teams, you are using OneDrive or SharePoint. The point is, by bringing collaboration and communication workloads together, by bringing apps into Teams and using Teams as a platform, users are getting a great user experience, organizations have a single place where users can easily access and use the apps they need to do their best work, and Microsoft knows that their customers are more likely to begin using apps that they may never have used previously, such as Stream, Yammer, and even core apps such as SharePoint. This explains why Teams isn't an additional cost and why it's included within every Microsoft 365 subscription. It's no coincidence that with the DAU of Teams now being 115 million, SharePoint's