Using Microsoft Teams for Vital Communications

Recent events in Washington DC reminded me that from time to time, the ability to issue vital communications across your entire organisation would be incredibly useful.

Granted, in such extreme circumstances as the “Capitol Riots”, the ability of technology to help would be limited. But, in vital, but not immediately life-threatening situations, platforms such as Microsoft Teams can be a useful mechanism to get a cohesive message to an entire workforce on any type of Teams-enabled device.

Conveniently, the clever folks at Microsoft have come up with a neat App for Teams – the Company Communicator.

Available as an open-source from the App Template library, the Company Communicator app “enables corporate teams to create and send messages intended for multiple teams or a large number of employees over chat allowing the organization to reach employees right where they collaborate.”

For one, I think the concept of Company Communicator is pretty neat and although I would personally make a couple of changes (it’s open-source, so I may well even make them when I have a few hours, ahem, “spare”) it’s a solid app both conceptually and in terms of its execution.

As a production-ready app template, implementation of the Company Communicator could not be simpler. Head over to the GitHub repo (part of the OfficeDev project) and grab the app and deploy it to your tenant. Pretty simple stuff.

I won’t bore you with the implementation details, the app is comprehensively documented in the repo wiki. The only real caveat worth considering is the standard “provided as-is” disclaimer associated with open-source and community-led initiatives even when being pimped by Microsoft. That said, like most of the Teams apps provided by the OfficeDev team, support is readily available from the team and the wider community via comments and the usual social media channels.

Like some of the other app templates, Company Communicator is definitely worth a look.

SM