How to Use The Advisor for Microsoft Teams To Plan Your Teams Rollout
Dear Teams project teams,
Say hello to your new best friend:
The Advisor for Microsoft Teams!
Microsoft has provided a wealth of planning resources to assist in the Teams planning process such as Excel and Microsoft Project templates to help every step of the way.
I have a folder of almost every single tool for migration, adoption, and everything in-between.
There are resources everywhere.
Today, there is an easier and more organized way to plan your Teams rollout.
Introducing the Advisor for Microsoft Teams
This was announced at Microsoft Ignite and what I would consider one of the less advertised features among long-anticipated capabilities such as private channels, Outlook integration, pop-out windows, and many more.
The Advisor for Teams is a template deployable from the Teams Admin center. Currently, it is in preview or early release but you can start using it today.
The purpose of the template is to accelerate Teams rollout through providing a space to plan everything for the project team with integrated success resources from adoption to deployment.
The biggest advantage is the Planner that comes with both major workloads. Here is an excerpt from Microsoft describing them:
“Using these Planner plans, you’ll assign tasks to the people responsible for each phase of the rollout — including the project manager, Teams and Office 365 admins, support people, and your adoption and user readiness team. Each rollout task contains all the guidance and resources you need to successfully complete the task.”
This is the best part. Check out the planner in action:
Here’s what the team looks like once it’s created
It doesn’t seem like much now but read on….
How to get started using the Advisor for Teams
To use it for the first time, click the Start button in the Deploying Teams workload widget on the Dashboard.
You can also go to the new tab in the side bar called Planning > Teams Advisor.
Once you get there, there is a Workloads and Users tab along with a button to add them to your tenant. Adding either of the workloads is what triggers the team creation.
Click the Add button, choose a workload, and add the users that are part of the project team. It will do it’s magic behind the scenes and show-up in your Teams list in quite a short amount of time.
The Deployment Team is created as a private Team along with the confidential group classification.
Each workload created using the Advisor includes the step-by-step Planner plan and other resources such as a Forms users satisfaction survey that can be used throughout your rollout.
Currently, there are two workloads you can deploy.
You can choose each separately depending on where you are in the rollout process.
Adding either of these will create their own dedicated channel.
1. Chat, teams, channels and apps
2. Meetings and conferencing
Chat, teams, channels, and apps channel
What’s Included:
- Planner Plan and Microsoft Form (pre-populated)
- Conversations tab, files, and wiki
Planner Plan
Here’s a screenshot of what comes out-of-the-box.
This plan is customizable and there are sub-tasks with associated links to Microsoft resources.
Microsoft Form
This is a user satisfaction survey that is also customizable.
Meetings and conferencing channel
What’s included:
- Planner Plan and Microsoft Form (pre-populated)
- Conversations tab, files, and wiki
Planner Plan
Here’s a screenshot of what the plan includes for meetings and conferencing.
This one has more buckets. I’ve separated it into two screenshots to display all of the tasks.
Planner Sub-task Details
This is an example of what it looks like when you open a Task. Note the Microsoft article links and all of the subtasks.
All screenshots in both channel plans include the relevant tasks, subtasks, and links as pictured below.
You can also choose to show these on the task card.
You’ll see the amount of links that are included by the paperclip icon. In the below example, there are 4 links.
Microsoft Form
This is the same form that’s included in both channels. Scrolling down a bit, here’s some more of the questions.
Additional Features of Advisor for Teams
Tenant Readiness Assessment
This one is pretty cool.
The readiness assessment is associated with the tasks listed to both plans. Progress also appears in the Teams admin center.
As you complete the tasks, it will reflect in the deployment status meter.
(Note: The tasks in the plan are not what update the the deployment status progress circle, but the actions that are inside the tasks. For example, if the task is to turn on licenses for Teams, you need to actually complete that in the Admin center in order for the progress meter to recognize it. Completing the task doesn’t actually update the deployment status.)
You can use this to identify and remediate any deficiencies in your environment before you rollout Teams.
Here’s what each assessment checks
Teams Advisor Bot
In the general channel a Teams Advisor Bot is created for you once you deploy the Advisor. Should you have any questions about the tasks, it says to “@mention the channel bot and it will do it’s best to address to your question.”
This is really only used to send a welcome message to the Team and that’s basically it.
Conclusion
This is an incredible tool that I wish I had been able to use already but will definitely recommend moving forward.
I hope you found this article inspiring to take some pressure off some of the stress that comes with managing such a large and exciting project that is Microsoft Teams!
Additional information on the Advisor for Microsoft Teams can be found here.
Originally published at https://www.jamielaporte.com on November 11, 2019.
