Teams is Not The Answer to Your SharePoint Adoption Problems

Teams to the Rescue!

“Microsoft Teams is the solution to all your problems”.

Forget about all those problems you are having with SharePoint adoption, use Teams instead. It will give your users what they need. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? It seems a pretty simple approach to solving all those headaches around SharePoint adoption.

It continues to amaze me when we work with customers that actually believe that Microsoft Teams is the saviour of all-things-SharePoint.

I am hoping you already realise that just deploying Teams is not the right way to resolve your SharePoint adoption problems. Instead, this sort of approach is just pushing those problems to one side based on a belief that users will embrace Teams as a collaboration tool. Now, there may be some genuine reasons behind this belief because in Teams, the persistent chat and easily integrated apps are generally well-received by users. However, as we have seen with multiple iterations of SharePoint, a new user interface does not necessarily equal a significant improvement in user adoption.

User Adoption Strategy

Deployment of Teams and improving SharePoint adoption are two separate components of an Office 365 adoption strategy. The reason users are not using SharePoint is not that the application itself is hard to use. Instead, how SharePoint is deployed has often been overcomplicated, there is insufficient guidance about how to use it, and there is a lack of ongoing training. Furthermore, most deployments of SharePoint have stood still for several years, failing to evolve to changing demands of users.

Teams will certainly not replace every SharePoint Site. Some users have more sophisticated needs or existing use cases might not lend themselves to the Teams model. However, it will be the case that many individual SharePoint Sites could be converted into Teams, while others modernised and some archived.

Your approach should be to empower users with a simple decision-making process and appropriate education. This approach to adoption will help users better understand when they should create Teams and when they should use SharePoint Sites.