Elly Yates-Roberts |
This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.
Having worked on SharePoint at Microsoft, I’ve long thought it was powerful but somewhat hindered by being hierarchical and browser-based. As such, I believed that if you could manifest the key components of SharePoint in an app where people could collaborate to get work done, it would take the platform to a whole new level.
Microsoft Teams is that next step. SharePoint is still the place where you put work and share it with people, but Teams is where you collaborate and do the work. It’s a great example of the kinds of investments Microsoft is making to deliver the ‘modern intranet’. Teams turns the intranet into a productive space by providing tools like asynchronous messaging, file-sharing, voice and video calls, and tabs where multiple apps can coexist inside a single user interface; a kind of holy grail of collaboration.
The interesting question is where Teams goes next. Will users have two screens, with Outlook on one and Teams on another? Or will Microsoft figure out how to blend the two? Either way, Teams represents a logical evolution of SharePoint. And Microsoft’s ideas are clearly in line with the enterprise world, with Teams now having over 13 million active daily users, including 91 of the Fortune 100. I think Teams will leave Slack behind. The Slack guys will claim credit for inventing a novel chat-based solution, but as Teams grows, Slack’s relevance is already waning.
At Nintex we’re working to amplify the value of Teams, just as we did with SharePoint. We watched SharePoint grow from nothing to become a global phenomenon, a strategic enterprise solution. Teams is on a similar trajectory.
As companies look to adopt Teams broadly, they recognise a need for strong governance. They want sophisticated administrative capabilities. We’ve just launched a comprehensive set of actions within our Nintex Workflow Cloud offering that enables just that. You can now use Nintex Workflow Cloud in conjunction with an underlying Microsoft Office 365 tenant to do things like create, update, clone or archive a team; add or remove team members or owners; create and post to channels; and much more.
In sum, our new Teams ‘connector’ is a powerful way to govern everything you do in Teams so you can deploy it across your organisation and be sure of maximising its value. We did this for SharePoint, and we’re doing it again with Teams.
Ryan Duguid is the chief of evangelism and advanced technology at Nintex