To that end, we recommend the following:
Adopt Microsoft Teams
Adopt Microsoft Teams as the primary communication and collaboration platform for UIUC, including external and internal telephony. Teams provides the natural transition from Skype for Business while remaining in the Microsoft ecosystem. Teams is fully integrated into Office 365 (including Exchange Online), the most used productivity suite on campus. Some campus units like Gies College of Business and the College of Education have been early adopters of Teams and have been pleased with the transition.
Campus leadership has approved the purchase of Microsoft A5 licensing to enable external calling in Teams as an interim transitional step, leaving open the possibility of CPAG recommending a move to a new collaboration and telephony platform. We do not believe that recommending an RFP process for a different platform is the right choice for campus. We believe that Teams provides a rich and continually improving feature set, ecosystem integrations, and a head start on full campus transition because of early adopters. Campus has an existing relationship with Microsoft that provides expert consultation and high-quality training resources.
There are prevailing negatives with Microsoft Teams, which we need to address.
- There is a current lack of integration between Teams tenants (platform instances generally corresponding to organizations). It is currently cumbersome for users to be members of more than one tenant, so campus users who may belong to professional organizations or other external collaborations that use Teams must switch back and forth between tenants. However, the public roadmap for Teams includes tenant integration in a single interface, which will remove this obstacle in 2022.
- Many external (and some internal) collaborations require campus users to use a different platform than Teams. We feel that this problem is inescapable, regardless of platform. There will always be external collaborators that use different platforms than our campus uses.
- Member management in Teams isn’t fully automated. Rosters can be imported via campus Active Directory groups, but not synchronized thereafter. This makes it difficult to manage membership based on role or enrollment. We recommend that Technology Services investigate and solve this problem to provide more automated member management in Teams.
- There is no standardized process for approving cross-platform integrations with Teams. This issue should be addressed by the portfolio governance group recommended below.
Microsoft Teams is an industry-leading collaboration platform with integrated telephony where Microsoft continues to invest resources for improvement. We believe that it can meet a majority of campus collaboration needs and therefore recommend that campus adopts and supports Teams as the center of our collaboration technology portfolio.
Related to this recommendation is Slack use on campus. Our conversations with Slack users revealed a passionate community that benefits from using Slack. Many Slack features compare favorably to Teams, but it lacks robust external telephony, full integration with the rest of our standard Microsoft Suite, and advanced levels of security, so we cannot recommend it as the primary messaging platform. However, we do recommend that campus performs a full security and privacy review of Slack. If this results in a favorable review, we additionally recommend that campus:
- allows continued Slack use because of its importance to external collaborations
- engages the Slack community to develop best practices around security and privacy
- explores the possibility of offering Slack Pro licensing through Webstore for those uses cases where Teams isn’t a viable option
Maintain Zoom Licensing in the Short-Term
Maintain Zoom Pro licensing for all faculty, students, and staff in the short term. Zoom is our primary virtual education delivery platform and the predominant remote meeting tool for faculty and staff.
The need for Zoom should be closely monitored beyond 2023 as Teams is adopted more widely. It is likely that Teams video meetings will replace Zoom for most remote/virtual meetings as users become more comfortable with Teams. Teams also has large meeting and webinar functionality like Zoom. We recommend an annual assessment of the service redundancy between Zoom and Teams, with a long-term goal of retiring enterprise Zoom Pro licensing if Teams meets campus needs.
While beyond the scope of our recommendations, it’s worth nothing that some units are already exploring what is beyond Zoom for the delivery of synchronous educational content. If this materializes into a new virtual education platform for campus, we recommend a faster exit from Zoom.
Maintain Box.com and Expand Integrations
Maintain Box.com licensing as cost allows or until organizational controls of document storage are more robust in Microsoft One Drive via Teams. Box.com is the predominant file storage platform on campus and provides the most robust mechanisms for sensitive data storage and organizational control of document storage. Box.com allows for units, rather than individuals, to “own” the document storage hierarchy, greatly reducing the risks introduced by employee turnover.
Expand and allow full Box.com integration with Microsoft Teams. File storage and sharing is a critical part of collaboration, so our file storage solution must be fully integrated with our primary collaboration and communication platform. We recommend that IT Council sponsor a technical working group to explore and recommend an implementation path for this integration.
Identity and Adopt Project Management Tool
Create an IT Council-sponsored working group to identify a project management tool to be centrally-funded and supported. We cannot immediately recommend Microsoft Tasks by Planner (integrated with Teams) because it was beyond our scope to deeply assess project management needs on campus. It is one of the project management tools currently used on campus along with Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Airtable, and others.
Identify and Adopt Virtual Whiteboarding Tool
Create an IT Council-sponsored working group to identify a virtual whiteboarding tool to be centrally-funded and supported. Miro and JamBoard are two of the more commonly used tools on campus. We must identify and support a tool that replaces the physical whiteboard of the past. Our current and future hybrid workforce needs a tool that supports brainstorming, ideation, and design in a virtual environment.
Establish Ongoing Portfolio Governance
Assign responsibility to a campus governance group to assess and manage the evolution of the collaboration technology portfolio. When it comes to how technology enables our mission activities, we can’t afford to leave ambiguous the ownership of the questions “Where are we and where should we be going?” Our needs and the technologies available to meet them change more rapidly than a task force every few years can reasonably address. We need a more iterative and adaptive approach that measures success, identifies and supports innovation, responds to emerging needs, and sees around the corner.
Invest in Consultative Training Resources
Provide resources to support central and unit-level IT teams to deliver consultative training on effectively using technology to enhance collaboration. Current training resources rely heavily on documentation (the knowledgebase) and generic live or asynchronous training sessions. While these general forms of documentation and training are important, they are not enough. Consultative training services are closer to campus mission activities, helping groups understand how to leverage technology in their context. It can mean the difference between technology-enabled collaboration and technology-enriched collaboration.
Finalize FERPA Certification of Microsoft Platform
Finalize FERPA Certification of Microsoft Office 365, One Drive, Exchange Online, and Teams. Universities are tasked with certifying technology platforms for use with sensitive student data per the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Our campus has not completed the FERPA certification process for Microsoft platform tools, despite the regular storage and transfer of FERPA-protected data via Microsoft tools including Exchange email. Other universities, including UIC, have completed this certification process. There is no reason why our campus should not certify Microsoft platform tools, and we recommend that the responsible parties complete the process as quickly as possible to ensure our compliance.