Wisconsin University Deploys Microsoft Teams Education Version to Collaborate Internally and Externally

Overview

When gearing up for a major project involving both internal and external subject-matter experts, our client’s grant department recognized a need for a robust collaboration platform. The team needed to be able to hold meetings with internal and external participants, divide those participants into groups, accommodate ad hoc instant-messaging, facilitate file sharing and more.

Solution

After reviewing options, their information technology team, together with the grant department, determined that Microsoft Teams was an ideal fit, given its feature set and thorough integration with Microsoft Office. This was a relatively quick process—the client team needed structure, and since they were already using Microsoft, Teams was a natural fit.

Concurrency conducted an initial workshop session to demonstrate features and share how quickly the client could get up and running with the Teams platform.

We then helped the client’s IT team ensure all aspects of the back-end setup were established not only correctly, but with an eye to future expansion of the platform’s use within the university. At this point in Teams’ evolution, there is relatively little public guidance from Microsoft on setting up the platform.

We brought the expertise to help the client team ensure all aspects were on point—from initial deployment in the Azure cloud through ensuring best practices in security and user administration going forward. We also created templates so users could quickly and easily get started making use of Teams’ advanced features.

Because Teams is a full-cloud application, the nature of this project also helped the client’s IT team prepare for potential future cloud migrations. In particular, the process helped the team get ready to upgrade Exchange users to Exchange Online.

Microsoft Teams has helped the grant department users coordinate in preparation for an important workshop and white paper. More broadly, since this initial Teams pilot program, other departments within the university have begun using Teams—and benefiting from the upfront work on this pilot project.