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In this segment, Craig continues his discussion of Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] We're going to finish up our discussion about Microsoft teams. What are some of the things you might want to use it for? What is this? How was it different from Zoom and everything else on the market? So let's get going.

hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for being with us today. I really appreciate all your comments to me [email protected]. A lot of people just respond to my weekly show notes. You get those by signing up for my email list to find out what's going on, what you should be doing, what free trainings we have, what paid courses there are.

We are coming out with a free again, free, free, free. I'm trying to help out here. It really is for you. Okay. A free, special report about all of these apps we're talking about

[00:01:00] today. So Karen's been working really hard on that with me, and we hope to have it out either this week or maybe the week after.

And it's going to be pretty detailed about some of the pros and cons when you should be using it, what policies should you have in place for your employees when it comes to these collaboration apps? So I think it's a very important topic. You know, so many of us just knee jerk our way into this with the COVID-19 thing, and we needed something now, please, anything.

And we knee-jerked into zoom. Most of us, some of us started using Slack. All of these things are up in usage. In fact, WebEx had so many people applying for it because it's really the only one, if you're a business, that you should be using. That they had to cut back. They were giving it away for free for like two or three months.

Even though they have a huge worldwide

[00:02:00] infrastructure, they still had some problems with the onboarding, getting everybody set up and ready. So there may or may not be free WebEx stuff going on right now. They're supposed to go through the end of June until the end of July. I'm not sure what it is right now, but anyway, We're talking about Microsoft teams right now.

Okay. so as I mentioned at the very end with Microsoft teams, you need to integrate your Skype went and we already know Skype is not considered to be overly secure. It was actually a little more secure before Microsoft bought it. Then Microsoft changed its entire architecture to one where it goes through Microsoft servers.

That way, if you're in China, Microsoft can censor you. Or if the law enforcement agencies in the US want to hear what you're saying, Microsoft can provide it to them. They couldn't do it before. So yeah. A little bit of resentment there. You

[00:03:00] probably noticed in my voice, right, Anyhow, back to Microsoft here.

The second big thing is it has this integration that a lot of people are looking for with your business apps. So you can use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Note. Planners, Sharepoint, one-drive. All integrated with Microsoft teams. And that is a huge win because all of that stuff is right there. Now the integration isn't as clean or as neat or as easy as maybe it should be.

But it is there and it will get better over time. You can still use all of those tools, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera, et cetera, with pretty much any of these apps. They're all designed to be integrated to varying degrees. Microsoft ultimately will win this battle because they own the source code, right.

They own the programs. They're going to take care of themselves first and they've been

[00:04:00] sued about that before. So no news there. The next point, customized workspace, and every team is different. So Microsoft teams is customizable so that you can integrate it with third-party apps, as well as Microsoft apps.

You know, that's really the trend right now. I see that across all of the industries, Cisco has done an interesting thing, and that is a couple of years ago. They decided to do a policy called API first. Now Microsoft is not doing this, but the whole idea behind API first is. That unlike Microsoft that tries to play everything close to the chest and give itself advantages over all of its competitors.

We've seen suits on that forever, like integrating Internet Explorer, right into the kernels, supposedly. And so that you could not use other browsers. You always had to have IE initially, and then they allowed other

[00:05:00] browsers, but you still had to have IE and then the courts ruled against them yet again.

So unlike Microsoft's approach to try and lock you in, Cisco has decided that they want to make all of the Cisco software use the same interfaces that third-party vendors have to use. That is phenomenal when it comes to integration. So if you want to use WebEx or WebEx teams or any component of any of the Cisco stuff, including their firewalls and the routers, et cetera, et cetera, you can.

They've got APIs for everything. Cause that's the only way they can access their own software. It's just absolutely phenomenal. So Microsoft teams do have some third party integration available on it, which can be handy. You also get real-time communications, which as I mentioned can be a problem.

This isn't just true with

[00:06:00] Microsoft. This is true for WebEx teams and Slack and everything else out there. But it's real-time. So a smart person's going to do something different with the email you typically try and delay, right? I try and read my email once a day and that's it.

 If someone really needs to get ahold of me, but they probably know how to really get ahold of me. Right. So I'm not getting interrupted. I can work on the stuff I need to get to work on.  I'm putting stuff together for my lives, for my webinars, for my radio show for everything else. If I get interrupted, particularly if I'm doing some programming work, it can cost me hours of time.

So I put off email and only go through it maybe once a day. Sometimes I'll go two or three days without really paying attention to my email. So I apologize to you. If you send me an email and you're hoping

[00:07:00] for a quick answer, I don't always get back to you very quickly. Right. I have other people in my team that that's what it's for.

So when we're talking about communicating in real-time with some of these collaboration apps, it's a double-edge sword. So instead of having emails, bouncing back and forth, which might take hours and hours, right? Because someone says something and half an hour later, another person reads it and responds.

Now, then that first person an hour later read to them response, you can just have it go over very quickly. It's phenomenal for productivity. When you need quick productivity, the high priority initiatives that you have can really move a lot faster because it's not an email. It's not getting a push back while you were waiting.

This is really instant messaging. Think of it like texting, right? So everybody can be on the same page with these teams apps you can see who has seen your

[00:08:00] messages and people can respond to them. They can start a thread. normally how does it work? You're well, you might send an email to everybody. Giving them an update, right?

They reply to you, but maybe not to everybody that happens all of the time. I know people that I, you know, I expect them to copy all because I, you know, I've got two or three people on it that are need to know, and they don't, they just reply directly to me. with these types of teams, apps, everybody's on the same page.

Everybody can see everything. This conversation with email can split into a bunch of different conversations with ideas, being directed at one person when it really should be a group discussion. So keep that in mind as well. When you're considering some of these team's applications, everybody knows what's going on, what the status is, and productivity.

Just keeps flowing. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

[00:09:00] Appreciate you being with me today. And of course, you can get me online as well. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up to my email list. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. And that gets you an email every week. Oftentimes it's Saturday mornings. Lately, it's been more like Mondays, you know, summertime, COVID-19, every excuse in the book, right. As to why it's been a little bit more delayed, but you know, expected by Monday. And it's got my summary for the week. It's got links to my podcast and also info about classes and courses and lives when they happen.

And then of course, here on the air. Take care, everybody. We'll be right back, stick around.

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