Microsoft Teams is the new flagship communication tool launched by Microsoft to enable consistent communication and collaboration between employees within teams in organizations. Though there are many other tools available in the market such as Slack and HipChat, Teams finds an edge over other players for various attributes that come along with it. While the former only offers communication, Teams serves as both a communication and collaboration platform by allowing employees to group chat, send private messages, share files, and get on video calls without the need for any email communication or follow-ups.
Despite many tools available in the market, often times employees complain that a lot of their productive hours get wasted in searching for the most important data/information and applications. The search is exhaustive disengaging employees and brings down focus on their core tasks. Teams addresses this issue with a new feature “Tab” empowering employees to easily locate data/documents. The “Tab” option in Teams allows employees to tab the most important and frequently visited applications or files on the homepage. It enables employees to quickly navigate to applications without wasting productive hours in searching for them. Although blogs, wikis, etc. can be tabbed in Teams, it requires a certain level of customizations that are explained in detail below:
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Blog
Blogs are migrated as site pages in SharePoint and integrating all the blogs into MS Teams can be chaotic. Hence, we custom created a web part “page listing” that holds a linkable list of all the blogs. Inserting the “page listing” web part into the site page and adding it as a tab into the Teams can save a lot of time for employees.
Ideation blogs and wikis follow a similar procedure as blogs.
Wikis
Wikis and nested wikis are very common in organizations, but migrating them from source to SharePoint can be a daunting task because SharePoint does not support nested wikis. Moreover, the Quick links option is also absent in SharePoint. Hence, we custom created a web part “Left-navigation” that embeds all the links present in a wiki page. When wikis are migrated as site pages in SharePoint, adding the “Left-navigation” web part into it can help in flitting between different wiki pages.
Activity
Activities are migrated as a custom list in SharePoint and the list can be integrated as a Tab into the Teams. Bookmarks and related communities follow a similar procedure like that of activities. We not only migrate content from IBM Connections to SharePoint but also integrate it into MS Teams that can enable employees to access files directly from the Teams. Moreover, “page listing” and “left-navigation” web parts allow users to enjoy IBM Connections like user-experience while using SharePoint and Teams.
