Tellus for Microsoft Teams Governance

Tellus provides a faster, simpler and safer way for your staff to take control of their collaboration needs using Teams. Don’t worry about your governance challenges or their specific needs – Tellus takes care of it all for you, including cataloging your Teams with custom metadata.

Your staff have full freedom to create Teams, but an automated approval workflow within Microsoft Teams ensures you avoid duplication and sprawl. They’ll love the wizard-style approach to creating Teams as it’s using their language.

Tellus has 4 unique templates that are all deployed with our AI-powered askSolution virtual assistant bot that have been engineered to meet the needs of your most common use cases. The Team, channels and tabs are all setup for your staff, giving them a running start to collaborate sooner in a structured way. We’ve removed the need for setup! Your organisation will be instantly equipped with greater MS Teams governance and the right collaboration tools that deliver both increased productivity and tighter security.

Once created, Tellus provides a simple, central dashboard for the day-to-day management of Teams. Staff will see not only their Teams, but also all accessible Teams. Security permitting, they’ll be able to search for and edit Teams, archive and delete Teams from one place. They’ll even be able to restore deleted Teams – something only possible through the O365 admin portal by Administrators today.

Finally, with Social Analytics, you’ve got access to real-time collaboration insights into Teams usage at your fingertips to continually enhance staff engagement and improve the way in which your staff work together. Social Analytics is a game changer for any organisation that wants to understand their people better, after all your people are your most valuable assets!

Why do you need it?

Managed well, Teams is your modern workplace, but without careful planning Teams can spiral out of control.

The top 3 concerns with Teams we hear from organisations just like yours are as follows:

1. How do I manage Teams creation, stop sprawl but empower staff with the right tools?
2. How do I manage security, compliance and external access?
3. How do I govern Teams and understand whether I need to keep them?

Tellus’ templatised approach removes the confusion of what tools to use and when. We provide a configured collaboration space that’s ready to use immediately including askSolution – your AI-powered virtual assistant.

There is no need for staff to understand how to setup and link the underlying Teams assets: SharePoint, Planner, OneNote – they’re all setup for your Teams.

Your dashboard is the only place to see a list of all Teams without being a Teams Admin access.

Is Tellus not exactly what you need? If there is a particular template, specific metadata, an approval process or additional security requirements you wish to have built into Tellus, we can customise your deployment for you!

1. Automatically apply the right level of security and compliance to your Teams
2. Capture the right metadata you need to understand who owns Teams and why
3. Tellus uses workflow approvals for the creation of new Teams
4. Your dashboard is the only place to see active, archived and deleted Teams
5. Manage your Teams; change active to archived, un-archive or delete Teams
6. With Social Analytics, you’ve got insights to enhance employee engagement

Microsoft Teams for project management

Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration tool that allows users to make video calls, create group chats and share documents. Whilst many use it daily at work to communicate with various team members, you can also use Microsoft Teams for project management. Microsoft Teams can be used beyond its face value when integrated with a variety of useful reporting tools that extend and boost its capabilities.

It can be the perfect central platform for tracking progress, tasks and promoting information transparency. The platform itself is grounded in open communication and transparency, by keeping everyone in the loop with a variety of conversation functions such as chats, voice calls, and group video chats. Standard and channel meetings can all be easily scheduled within the Teams platform where team members can use the in-built Whiteboard functionality to record notes and share ideas. These notes are all available for view and access after meetings so anything important that was raised during the discussion won’t be lost in memory. Its file storing capabilities ensures a central repository of information is maintained so that each team member can easily access, share and collaborate on project tasks.

Clients are the driving force behind any project and their feedback are critical to the success of one. Microsoft Teams offers organisations the ability to invite clients and external partners to join Teams’ channels with guess access whereby they are able to converse with project members and view shared files. Clients’ expectations are much easier to manage when regular meetings and progress updates are provided as they can see for themselves where the project is at.

If you find that the project management using Microsoft Team’s in-built capabilities aren’t enough to meet your project needs, then don’t be afraid to enlist the help of additional Microsoft or third-party apps.

Microsoft Teams project management apps

Remote working has become the new norm whether that’s across international waters or outside of the traditional office cubicles. The freedom to work wherever you please with the added flexibility of choosing your own working hours has greatly benefitted work-life balance. However, the lack face to face interaction has brought upon its own set of challenges. In the current environment, it’s essential that organisations are providing their teams access with the right set of tools that keeps them engaged and empowered. There are more than 450 apps that can be integrated within the Microsoft Teams platform to drive productivity, inclusiveness, and collaboration to enhance any working style. Here are a few noteworthy ones that can assist with project management in Microsoft Teams:

Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner is the task management app that comes with any Office 365 subscriptions. When integrated with Microsoft Teams, it makes it easy for project members to have an overview of all the tasks requiring completion, when they’re due and who is accountable for them. Its intuitive interface enables tasks to be created, assigned, tracked, and reviewed within a few clicks. The web-based application extends the capabilities of MS Teams as a project management platform by providing a simple, visual dashboard that invites staff collaboration and planning.

With Microsoft Planner, the traditional hassle of back and forth emails and lack of traceability involved with managing projects are eliminated. Its highly visual interface makes it easy for everyone to see and understand the progress of a project in a straightforward manner. Aside from being a useful collaborative planning tool, it can also be used for reporting purposes. As a reporting tool, Microsoft Planner removes the need for users to spend hours creating complex reports and charts. It automatically pulls the status of tasks and creates simple visualisations of bar and pie charts that provide an instant view of how the project is progressing. Managers can easily stay informed by seeing the completion status of tasks, any blockers, its priorities and the workload of each project member.

Reporting with Microsoft Planner can be further extended with the help of Power BI. Power BI’s powerful reporting capabilities can assist with exploring your project plan in greater detail and depth. Whilst Microsoft Planner’s default visuals provide a great overview of the basic needs involved in tracking project progress, they may be a little lacking in terms of analytics. A Power BI dashboard leverages the abilities of AI and data analytics to drill down into specific tasks, display real time breakdowns, and uncover hidden insights through slicing and filtering. Want to see how Power BI and Microsoft Planner can open up your world of project management? Contact Antares today to find out how!

Microsoft Project

If you’re a visual person, then you’ll love Microsoft Project. Ever since its introduction, the application has assisted project managers with planning, assigning tasks, tracking progress, creating reports, plus much more. When integrated with Microsoft Teams, project management becomes a simple and intuitive user experience. Microsoft Project provides various users with differing levels of access to projects and functionalities, enabling organisations of all sizes to leverage its flexible scalability.

Like other Microsoft offerings, Microsoft Project has a familiar interface that makes it easy for users to navigate and adopt the application without considerable change. Its customisable templates makes it easy to kick off a project management plan without having to spend valuable time building one from scratch. The application also offers a variety of view options such as Gantt charts, managing budgets, and assigning resources, providing you with the right information at any stage of the project.

As an application built specifically for project management, Microsoft Project comes equipped with many tools that other similar products on the market don’t have. With Microsoft Project, teams can visually plan their projects with the right prioritisation and definition of tasks in place. A central team dashboard provides a wholistic overview of everything relevant to the project and can be integrated with Power BI to create rich, dynamic visualisations.

Whilst Planner and Project seem akin to one another in terms of features, Microsoft Project provides greater capabilities and advanced abilities for project management.

ScrumGenius

Let’s be honest, daily check-ins are exhausting. Everybody is busy with what’s piled up on their plates and at times like this, technology can really lighten the load. ScrumGenius is a Teams bot that assists project managers with automating recurring daily tasks such as scheduling meetings, running stand-ups, and collating responses.  Aside from being able to integrate with Microsoft Teams, it can also work hand in hand with other project management apps such as GitHub, Asana, and Zapier.

ScrumGenius streamlines project management within Microsoft Teams by making the most efficient use of everyone’s time. By acting as a digital assistant, it checks in with each individual team member and prompts them to enter their progress, blockers and daily tasks each morning. The bot then collates all the responses, compiles them, and sends them off as a report to the entire project team for review.

Traditional stand-ups were often rigid and inflexible with their meeting times and did not complement the changing nature of the current working landscape. Individuals who were in disparate locations and separated by time zones often faced difficulty in syncing up at certain times for meetings. ScrumGenius eliminates this barrier and makes best use of everyone’s time by automatically following up on plans and reporting on blockers, so that team members have more time to focus on their core tasks.

Tellus solves the number 1 challenge with Teams: governance. Tellus empowers your staff to collaborate and do their best work whilst providing effective governance at the same time.

Tellus provides an all in one Teams governance model that takes the entire lifecycle of a Team and usage of the collaboration platform into account. Everything from the creation to life to termination of files, users, Teams, and records have been integrated into its capabilities.

Tellus stops Teams sprawl by focusing on collaboration use cases that take staff through a more natural process for Teams creation.

Obtain complete oversight of the creation of every MS Team and stop duplications before they happen without taking away your staff’s freedom.

Security and compliance is built into each and every use case. Your staff don’t have to worry about technical jargon, we apply the right level of security based on their needs and your policies!

Management of Teams becomes simple with a central dashboard that gives both your staff and Teams Admins control. Access, search for, manage and govern Teams from one place leveraging metadata that fast-tracks decision making.

Empower your staff with an intuitive layout that offers a seamless Microsoft Teams experience. Our new user interface and templated approach removes the confusion surrounding the platform so you and your staff can use it to its full potentials.

Tellus automatically monitors your Teams and updates their active status so you can make quick decisions on archiving, retaining or deleting them.

Be kept in the loop with a bird’s eye view of all your Teams and easily restore or delete them with a simple click of a button.

Importantly, Tellus governance is built into the fabric of Microsoft Teams.

askSolution is deployed as part of Tellus to your Teams on creation. Immediately, you’ll have access to an AI-powered virtual assistant to help you unlock collective knowledge, retain IP and share information instantly.

What if you could build an organisational brain that retains your IP and frees up your experts to focus on important work?

askSolution is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered virtual assistant accessible through Microsoft Teams that answers questions for your staff from any device, anywhere at any time. askSolution is your organisational brain built to answer topic-filtered questions that’s working where your staff are already working today. Decentralise crucial knowledge that resides in your subject matter experts and drive your organisation’s competitive advantage with the sharing of precious information.

Wrong information costs organisations more than just time and money but also wastes precious resources that could have been better spent. askSolution captures tacit knowledge so that important decisions across the organisation are based on correct expert information.

What if every time staff asked a question they got the right answer in an instant?

askSolution facilitates organisational knowledge retention and sharing. If askSolution knows the answer to your question, you’ll have it in an instant. If askSolution can’t help, your experts are notified immediately. Don’t let your staff be weighed down with the endless frustration of searching for the right answer to their questions. askSolution provides on demand answers so your staff can focus on doing what they do best.

Most importantly, askSolution learns from each interaction so that the same question is never answered twice again! In the current world of remote work where individuals aren’t able to pop over onto the other side of the office to ask a question, askSolution is always ready to help and be their source of assistance.

Want to know more about askSolution? Read more here. 

With Social Analytics, you’ve got access to insights into Teams usage to continually enhance staff engagement and improve collaboration.

Knowledge is power. But, how much do you really know about staff in your organisation and how they interact with each other? Who are your high performers? Who are your key influencers? Who’s not engaged?

Introducing Social Analytics. Powered by AI, Social Analytics digs deep into your Microsoft Teams interactions to provide real-time insights about how staff are engaging with each other (or otherwise) and talking about your organisation.

Social Analytics is an advanced networking tool that can help you ultimately keep staff engaged – no matter where they work from. With real time insights into how your employees engage with one another, you’ll uncover previously unbeknownst interaction frequencies, identify engagement trends and uncover individual’s connectivity with one another.  Analytics and user activity reports of Microsoft Teams interactions will all be made available to your organisation in the form of visual dashboards that can be further broken down and segmented. Microsoft Teams usage reports are all captured within Social Analytics so managers and team leaders can plan necessary adjustments accordingly to improve employee sentiment.

Displayed through a visual dashboard that can be segmented down by Teams, users and date ranges, you’ll be able to drill down to a macro level for insights on frequency of postings, responsiveness, connectivity, plus much more.

Social Analytics enables you to:

• Map and enhance employee engagement by tracking how your business teams and individuals are collaborating
• Empower team leaders to assess their performance, identify training needs and identify those in need of assistance
• See what’s trending in conversations through word maps and sentiment analysis
• Manage change effectively by identifying champions, laggards and those who are resistant
• Develop strategies to change employee engagement, conversations, satisfaction, and track results

We can customise Tellus for you!

We know every organisation uses Microsoft Teams in their own unique way. If there is a particular template, specific metadata, an approval process or additional security requirements you wish to have built into Tellus, we can customise your deployment for you.