Only a few years ago, Microsoft Teams was the newcomer in Office 365.

When Microsoft made Teams generally available in March 2017, the company described it as a chat-based workspace for Office 365.

By 2020, the conversation around workplace collaboration feels remarkably different.

Remote work has suddenly become a reality for organizations around the world, putting cloud communication and collaboration tools in the spotlight.

From Optional Tool to Working Environment

Before widespread remote work, organizations could often rely heavily on physical offices.

Need to ask a colleague something?

Walk over to their desk.

Need a meeting?

Book a conference room.

Need a document?

Access the internal file share.

Once employees are distributed across different locations, these ordinary interactions have to become digital.

Platforms such as Teams therefore start playing a much bigger role.

Communication Needs Context

Email remains extremely useful, but it was never designed to represent every type of workplace interaction.

A project can produce enormous email threads involving different participants, attachments and versions of documents.

Chat-based collaboration creates a different experience.

The conversation can remain associated with the people and resources involved in the work.

This makes Teams more than a replacement for instant messaging.

It can become part of the workplace itself.

The Microsoft 365 Connection

Another reason Teams is significant is its position inside Microsoft’s broader ecosystem.

Organizations using Microsoft’s cloud environment may already depend on Microsoft identity, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Teams fits within that connected environment.

This represents an important advantage for Microsoft because organizations do not necessarily have to think of Teams as an isolated communications product.

It becomes another part of their Microsoft 365 strategy.

Remote Work Creates Administrative Challenges

The move toward remote work also introduces challenges for IT administrators.

Supporting users outside the office changes the nature of technical support.

Administrators need to think about:

identity and authentication,
endpoint security,
device management,
application access,
information sharing,
collaboration governance,
user education.

Simply deploying collaboration software is not enough.

Users need reliable and secure access to the environment surrounding it.

Where Should Documents Live?

Remote collaboration also highlights a question that organizations often overlook.

Where is the authoritative copy of a document?

When employees exchange attachments repeatedly by email, multiple versions can easily exist.

A cloud-based collaboration model encourages organizations to think more carefully about shared document locations and co-authoring.

OneDrive and SharePoint consequently become an important part of the collaboration conversation alongside Teams.

Microsoft’s documentation confirms that SharePoint libraries and Teams files can be made available through OneDrive synchronization mechanisms, illustrating how closely the file and collaboration experiences are connected.

The Future Is Hybrid

Nobody knows exactly how working habits will look several years from now.

But 2020 has demonstrated something important.

Organizations need technology capable of allowing employees to remain productive when their physical location changes.

The workplace can no longer be defined entirely by a building.

Identity, applications, files, devices and communication all have to work outside the conventional office perimeter.

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Teams arrived in 2017 as a new Office 365 collaboration tool.

Only three years later, its role is considerably easier to understand.

Cloud collaboration is becoming fundamental to the way modern organizations operate.

The lesson for IT professionals is equally important.

Managing the future workplace is not going to be about a single application.

It will require an understanding of identity, endpoints, security, communication and cloud information management working together.