Category: Microsoft Teams

Categories
Microsoft Teams Office 365 Project Management SharePoint

Managing projects in a modern world (Part 1)

Last week I wrote a blog post and it got a lot of interest. Just not for the reasons I would of thought. One of the screen shots on the blog post contained an image of dashboard.

Everyone was quite intrigued by this and were wondering what it was. So that is what today is about. This is the first of multiple blog posts showing how you can leverage Azure DevOps, Teams and Project Online to manage projects.

That dashboard is Azure Devops. Microsoft’s developer collaboration tools. It includes repositories(Azure Repos) for code, Kanban boards(Azure Boards), Test Plans(Azure Test Plans) as well as a few other tools targeted to developers.

In our case we are building a brand new intranet and plan to use Azure Boards to manage our workload across a variety teams, Azure Repos to store code for our Custom web parts as well as any scripts we create including site themes and site designs. Last but not least we will use Azure Test Plans to mange the quality of our new intranet.

So how can we setup our environment to ensure:

  • Has a place to communicate
  • Has a place to upload documents
  • Can manage their tasks
  • manage their sprint
  • See the overall project health

Step 1 Setup Azure Devops

  1. Create a new project called Intranet
  2. Create the teams in Azure Devops: “Communications”, “Training”, “Developers”, “Testers”
  3. Define the sprints in our case they are two week long
  4. Assign the sprints to each team
  5. Add your backlog of tasks
  6. Assign tasks to sprints
  7. Add the Delivery Plan extension for Azure DevOps

You will end up with something that looks like this.

Azure DevOps will play the basis for how we manage and plan our tasks. It is more powerful than Planner but can require significantly more effort to setup.

Step 2 Setup Up Teams

  • Create a new Team called Intranet
  • Create four new Channels “Communications”, “Training”, “Developers”, “Testing”
  • * Add a Azure DevOps KanBan board to each Channel aligning the Azure DevOps Teams Kanban to the Microsoft Teams Channel
  • * Configure Azure DevOps connector

* Azure DevOps was called Vistual Studio Team Services. Some of the documentation still references the old name.

All of your Channels should now look something like this

You will also be able have conversations about specific tasks

Step 3 Create a Roadmap

  • Turn on the Project Roadmap feature
  • Create a new Roadmap
  • Create Rows that align to each Azure DevOps Team
  • Add Features from DevOps to track the status and timeline

You will end up with something like the roadmap below.

The next post in this series will go into detail on how to setup Step 1 Azure DevOps. Configuring the iterations, teams and backlogs to work properly with Project and teams.

Categories
Microsoft Teams Office 365

Quick thought on Private Channels in Microsoft Teams

Support for private channels is the number one requested feature on the user voice for Microsoft teams. Over 16000 votes have been made in an effort to get this feature implemented. The more interesting part in my mind is that there seems to be a strong divide between some of the experts of whether or not the feature should be implemented.

There have been a lot of interesting conversations on twitter around this topic.

This got me thinking. There really is no guidance that I have found on how to handle the situation other than create another team and limit the team members. This made sense until I discovered a feature solely on accident.

You can name group chats and pin them

The company I work for has been growing recently and we have implemented team leads for the various practices. I had happened to start a group chat with the team leads and by accident clicked on the little pencil next the people name.

And now low and behold we now have a group chat named team leads. With the core features of a team. Conversations, Files and Tabs.

Now I know what you might be thinking.. The conversation history thing in teams is just a long running list of my recent conversations this teams lead chat will just get lost after awhile.

Luckily enough we have the ability to pin chats.

Now that group chat will always be available at the top of the chat window. When you are done with your project or that group chat you can unpin in and it will be lost into your history to be recovered through search!

So now my take do we need Private Channels?! yeah but we should look to named grouped chats first.

Categories
Microsoft Teams Office 365 SharePoint

Where are my features!?!

Photo by Daniel Gonzalez on Unsplash

Microsoft has done a really great job over the last 6 months to bring to light all the hard work they are doing within SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. Between the announcements at ignite , various blog posts, twitter users like @anne_michels and @vesajuvonen. There are a ton and I mean a ton of new features coming to teams and SharePoint that we have been asking for since modern sites and teams came into existence.

Now the question is… When are we getting these features? Microsoft has provided a very handy tool called the Microsoft 365 roadmap. You can find it at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/. This site will provide you with an overview of the high-level new features the Microsoft is developing and rolling out to Windows 10, Office 365 and EMS.

If you want to see just SharePoint Online and Microsoft team roadmap you are able to filter your results to return only those. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams%2CSharePoint. This may sound great however how accurate is the roadmap?

Well judging by the top few results for SharePoint.. Not very accurate. According to the roadmap organizational news was released last month and yet is still in development.

What I have noticed is the release date is when Microsoft will start rolling out the feature to tenants that are set up for targeted releases. Even if you are setup for targeted releases you may still be waiting weeks for the feature to make it to your tenant. If you are on the standard release it will be weeks and possibly months before you get it.

Currently there is no way for you to know when the anything will be released to your tenant. So be wary of what you read and try to stem the excitement and set realistic expectations with your business or clients to when they might be able to start implementing these amazing new features.