How Teams provides a collaborative culture for people on the move

The way we work has changed dramatically in the last decade - even more so in recent weeks. A shift away from fixed desks to hotdesking, remote working and co-working has been a key driver of the developments that allow employees to work from anywhere. IT services have evolved to deliver secure, performant access to information, frequently moving information to the cloud. Whilst more applicable to smaller companies than enterprises, services such as Dropbox and Box started to move information away from file servers and into shared cloud storage. Cloud storage offered the advantages of being accessible from anywhere and syncing to devices to allow offline access. More importantly these services allowed easy collaboration, from sharing files to collaborative editing and commenting.

Remote working required new ways of communicating.

Frequently driven by consumer adoption first, technologies like VOIP delivered telephony to the desktop independent of location. Unified Communications then linked telephony and email. Consumer chat services led to instant messaging products like Slack that provided always-on team communications. When everyone in an organisation is potentially a remote worker and information is no longer siloed by location, staff too start to become a global resource, able to form teams across geographic boundaries to bring together the most appropriate staff for a project.

Microsoft’s products have always been central to providing these services but finally these many disparate technologies have been brought together in one platform – Microsoft Teams. Under the hood many of the technologies are the same. Microsoft 365 Groups provide the organisational structure, to which SharePoint sites, OneDrive storage locations, Exchange Email, Skype For Business unified communications have been linked, all under the unified Teams interface. Data is stored and protected in the Azure environment, and authentication and security are provided by Active Directory.

Given all the limits above, where does the frequent question about the "5000 item limit" come from, especially as we know we can hold 30 million items in a list. The 5000 item limit applies to the user interface presented by SharePoint in its standard views. Once a list has over 5000 items, whilst the list itself can be scrolled through to view all items, the user is limited when presenting information that's filtered or sorted.

Atvero is not limited by this because of the way it's built. Rather than a customization of a standard SharePoint view, Atvero is delivered using the SharePoint Framework (SPFX) as a standalone application that can be embedded into standard SharePoint pages. This lets us call the SharePoint APIs (through SharePoint and MS Graph) to access the items in the list directly, and display them to the user. The APIs we use don't have the same 5000 item limit, and so we can present the complete list however we want. Some of the bigger projects under Atvero control have over 13,000 records corresponding to similarly large SharePoint lists, and whilst the standard SharePoint UI is limited, Atvero has no problems at all.

How Teams enables more effective communication

Microsoft Teams has also fully embraced inter-organisation collaboration. Users from one organisation can be invited as guests into another organisation. External users can participate in Teams chat, make video calls and access files. The same information security and data governance policies can be applied to internal and external users. For the design and construction projects, which have always required collaborative working and multiple stakeholders, the benefits of utilising Microsoft’s cloud based collaborative tools are manifold and considerable with huge potential for improved workflow and reduced risk.

Add in the benefits of utilised other cloud-based programmes like Atvero that can be seamlessly plugged into Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online tools can further support collaborative working.