A few weeks back, me and  Pelle (Niteco, CEO) had a call with Microsoft Azure Support based in Singapore. We discussed some of the challenges we were facing and one of the critical issue was to have invoicing more structured.  Its not always easy to have your customers have Hosted Apps or backups on your environment  under a different Resource Group and then share billing details internally with the Accounting Team for invoicing. 

Lets face it, not everyone in an IT company has  a technical mind and people in finance only care about numbers. They ideally like to see how the billing gets calculated and how it matches with the invoice they receive from Microsoft every month.  Ahhhh its really a pain at times to break down everything and present it to them , the time and effort it took was just too much. If you are a CSP then its a different story all together and i guess CSP Tier 2 partners also have a much more simpler dashboard to get the invoicing details.

After a few back and forth calls and some initial testing i was told by Microsoft Support that  they would be adding a new User Role in the coming weeks. Well was excited about it and  on Tuesday  25th of May this was released at least for our environment and the new Billing Reader role allows you to delegate access to just billing information with no access to services such as VMs and storage accounts. Users in this role can perform Azure billing management operations such as viewing subscription scoped cost reporting data and downloading invoices. 

In the last few post we completed the planning ,  concept and usage scenario of Microsoft Teams. Now its time to create a implementation checklist and its pretty straight  forward. At the end of the post you will find the link to the excel file which contains all the required checklist items :)

Microsoft Teams license is enabled for all users assigned with the eligible Office 365 subscriptions and  there are no differences between the different Office 365 subscriptions, the availability of the compliance capabilities does rely on the correct subscription level. 

Assuming that you have read the previous post and have completed your initial planning for Microsoft Teams - now its time to focus towards concepts and usage scenarios. We will come to the implementation phase as well and in a way we are already doing it, one step at a time.

This post will be more focused and relevant to the following :

• Project Manager
• Business Analyst
• Technical Architect
• IT Admin
• Power Users

​The plan is to implement Microsoft Teams, which brings chat-based workspace in Office 365 where users have a open space office environment to have conversations and collaborate with each other while building relationships. 

One of the first question which comes to mind is, we are already doing it with Outlook, SharePoint, Yammer, etc so why do we need Microsoft Teams?

Below is a simple breakdown of how most organizations actually use all these applications and where does Microsoft Teams fit in.

• Outlook:  Outlook is used for enterprise-grade email which now has groups functionality
  • Leveraged by users who prefer to collaborate in the familiar environment of email and/or a more formal, structured manner.
  • Provides specific business processes that require email usage to transmit documents and information inside and outside corporate boundaries.
  •  Communicates and connects with users who are outside of immediate workgroups or organizations

Microsoft Teams is now available for O 365 Users and a lot is being talked about, from Slack comparison to its features and how / when to use it. I was under the dilemma like most users on how to get started with it and when to use it? If all of what is said, is available in Teams then why do we have Yammer, Outlook, Delve, SharePoint Intranet, OneDrive, etc.

I have broken down this post in to two and here is the first part which actually lets you do the planning. After doing a bit of research and playing around with it, i was able to come up with the following:

- O 365 Package
- Exchange & SharePoint Hybrid or Online

The two above will help you in starting the conversation on Teams in the right direction.

Questions you should ask your customers or internally in the organization to layout the path for using Microsoft Teams.