Microsoft Teams and the multi-conversations of madness

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while, to be honest ever since guest access was a new thing in Microsoft Teams.

Straight away I started to find myself being fragmented between multiple tenants, multiple chats, and multiple contexts.

While my title borrows from “Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness”, at least in that movie there’s a single instance of the person between universes.

What conversations in Microsoft Teams is more like, is the movie “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once”. If you haven’t seen it – go out and see it now, it is amazing on so many levels.

What I tend to find when speaking with different people about conversations in Microsoft Teams, is that either they find themselves tenant switching and jumping between different conversations all the time, or they just don’t tenant switch at all – not because they don’t have a need or aren’t in other tenants, but because they just can’t be bothered.

So shared channels (or as the feature is officially called “Teams Connect shared channels”) is here, and what I’m seeing is that while users are wanting it – IT administrators are hesitant to turn it on, and for very good reason.

There are two types of shared channel experiences:

• The internal experience which makes a lot of sense and is manageable, but still fragments the universe a little further
• The external experience, which is quite frankly… well… I can’t describe it. I mean I get it, but holy moly!

In a recent blog post for ENow Software, I finally sat down and captured the different places conversations can exist within Microsoft Teams – and let me tell you, it’s a lot more than you think.

Read on… if you dare!

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Also published on Medium.