2020 has been an incredible year for Microsoft and especially for Microsoft Teams. With many organizations quickly adopting new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has seen a meteoric rise in usage for meetings and collaboration. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that by the end of April 2020, usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users, a massive increase from the 44 million users reported the previous month.

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is that the platform is growing and adding new capabilities on a seemingly weekly basis. As organizations look for new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams into their business processes, they will soon discover solutions for customized workflows, business process automation, direct integrations with Microsoft and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience, and even industry vertical-specific functionality for supported tenants.

To help organizations discover some of these capabilities, I compiled a list of four unique use cases that organizations might consider for the next stage in their Microsoft Teams journey.

Is Microsoft a security company? The idea has been on my mind for a while. I think back to the days of my early Microsoft experiences. For me, that would be Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0 up to DOS 6.22. It was the base of my conquest for co-sysop on a few dial-up BBSs (bulletin boards), getting really good download ratios, and finding all the sweet “warez”. I was also digging through every inch of my computer. Today, in my role as a Microsoft 365 pre-sales architect, I give even more thought to the security aspects of Microsoft’s environment.

We at CDW pride ourselves on developing automation tools to make our collaboration deployment engineers’ jobs easier. We have created tools to automate just about everything there is to automate with Cisco on-premises products: Communications Manager, Unity Connections, Contact Center Express/Enterprise and Voice Gateways, to name a few. With the migration to more cloud-based solutions in the collaboration space, and coinciding with our new service of deploying the cloud voice platform RingCentral, it made sense to create an automation tool to quickly provision users and phones.

Governance can be an overwhelming undertaking. For the organization, it can be viewed as stifling innovation; for the IT department, it is viewed as necessary to prevent out of control resources causing havoc in billing and security. These two divergent cultures must figure out a way to implement a solid governance structure for the cloud while still allowing developers and business the innovation the cloud promises. Microsoft has a solution to help bridge this conflict.

With IT departments around the world suddenly focused on supporting their remote workforces, administrators are evaluating Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) to allow users to be productive from home. WVD is quick to roll out, especially if users have already been synchronized to Azure Active Directory. However, there are underlying infrastructure prerequisites that should be understood before setting up the first Host Pool.

I have been helping admins who have been tasked with immediately piloting WVD, and this post aims to document some of infrastructure items that are commonly overlooked in the rush to stand up the solution.

How do you keep your data secure while enabling workers to be productive? Working from home creates many challenges to delivering apps and data to those remote users. This blog will walk you through some of those specific challenges and then propose some possible solutions for either a short-term fix or a long-term strategy.