Rescue Teams–Microsoft Teams Comes Through

One staff work tool that has been a part of UMass Boston IT about as long as IT Outcomes itself is Microsoft Teams. As a part of the Microsoft Office suite of productivity tools Microsoft Teams has been available for university staff to use for many years, but in 2020 when the pandemic shut down campus Microsoft Teams came into greater use, especially among IT staff. In fact, it could be said that Teams provided a crucial lifeline to the IT department. At a time when meeting in person on campus was not possible, Teams allowed IT staff to communicate and collaborate from home and work on group projects that otherwise may have had to be postponed or cancelled.  

UMass Boston has had full access to Microsoft Office 365 tools for a long time, but it’s fair to say that Teams was one feature available to it that was highly underutilized, if not outright ignored. It was only when IT staff recognized how inefficient and unorganized things got when a project requiring group participation came up that they realized they had a problem. Email worked poorly as a group communications tool when planning, and when hosting face-to-face meetings on campus was no longer an option, IT knew they had to find a better way. Little did they know a better way had been at their fingertips all along.  

Assistant Vice Chancellor of Client Services John Mazzarella has become a strong advocate of Microsoft Teams. “You can message people almost like text messaging on your phone; you can do group texts,” he said, just starting to describe the many features’ Teams has that make work on group projects so much easier. “If you have a certain group, your department or a project that you’re working on, or a class with students and a teacher, any group, any defined group, can form a team,” he continued, indicating how usage of Teams has spread throughout the university and become a teaching tool as well.  

Of course, the feature that could be called the star of Teams is its video conferencing capability. Group leaders can schedule meetings involving everyone in that group easily in Outlook, and the meeting can hold an unlimited number of team members. And while obviously this function is what Zoom was created for, Teams provides many other work tools that can be used outside of, and even during, video conferences that Zoom does not. Members can share files with one another and work together on them while meeting on video, and chat messages can be sent either to the entire group or specific members and work much like a text chain. Teams even allows groups to create different “channels” on their Teams site. For example,
the IT staff “One IT” Teams site has a channel specific to general working issues, but it also has one where people can post pictures of their pets, and another in which healthy lifestyle activities are discussed. 

Teams is an excellent example of a technology service that was necessitated and first adopted at UMass Boston because of the pandemic but was determined to be so helpful that its usage continued to grow long after the pandemic ended. As things turned out, even though university staff are now free to meet in person to work on group projects, the ease and convenience of video conferencing has rendered the in-person meeting almost obsolete. And as the era of video conferencing has been moving full speed ahead, almost every UMass Boston department wanted to jump on the Teams bandwagon. Enter Teams Training and Support, with Technology Training Specialist Katherine Ananis. In addition to the Teams webinars that individual staff members can register for, Katherine began to offer Teams training workshops to work groups throughout the university and scheduled at their chosen time. If there is one person most responsible for the almost university-wide use of Microsoft Teams at UMass Boston, Katherine Ananis is that person. 

It is not hyperbole to say that Microsoft Teams has transformed collaboration and teamwork at UMass Boston. Not only are staff saying that working on group projects is much easier because of Teams, but the work groups themselves are much more productive. Now that’s Teamswork in Action!