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MS Teams has proved to be very essential to many Organizations but how many of us have really integrated the Service Desk to MS Teams?

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork and aims to make collaboration easier in organizations by creating a shared workspace where users can chat, meet, share files, and access business apps. However, to enable maximum efficiency of these digital workspaces, the IT Service Desk can use teams for creating and resolving tickets.

Why MS Teams for Service Desk?

Many experts agree that MS Teams is helping the service desk to leverage the collaboration app from Microsoft as an additional channel for IT support management. By bringing a host of service desk capabilities like incident management into Microsoft Teams, Rezolve.ai bridges the gap between IT service desk teams and end-users.

Both technicians and end-users need various kinds of information about their service desk tickets during the ticket life cycle. The built-in Teams chatbot allows them to interact and fetch information and perform the required service desk actions right away for quicker resolution.

Technicians/Agents can perform the below activities:

• Use OneNote to add notes. Within Teams, you can view and edit your OneNote (directly within the Teams window) or you can click to edit in the OneNote app.
  
  
• Add notes of users' problems when needed to ensure the technician assigned with this particular ticket can understand and is up to date on what has to be done to resolve the issues reported by the customer.
  
  
• Approve requests made by users depending on the type of request reported by the customer/user.
  
  

Types of requests you use in Service Desk using MS Teams:

• Impact: It is a measure of the effect of an incident, problem, or change on business processes. The impact is often based on how service levels will be affected.
  
  
• Urgency: It is a measure of how long it will be until an incident, problem, or change has a significant business impact.
  
  
• Priority: It is a category that identifies the relative importance of an incident, problem, or change. Priority is based on impact and urgency, and it identifies the required times for actions to be taken. Impact and urgency are used to assign priority.
  
  
• Picking up requests: Technicians can pick the requests based on their type and then assign the same to the corresponding technicians.
  
  
• Assigning requests to technicians: MS Teams act as a connecting channel between the Users/Customers and the IT Support Staff. Once the requests are picked, they are assigned to the corresponding technicians for their resolution.
  
  
• Resolving tickets through the actionable cards within the chat window: Actionable cards enable technicians to take quick actions right from within Outlook and resolve tickets as and when they arise.
  
  

Why should we use Microsoft Teams for ticketing?

It is crucial to understand how Teams fits into the larger Office 365 picture, as creating Teams has some wider implications. Every Team created will automatically create a matching Plan. While this brings some great benefits, such as shared documents and centralized team information, it can cause some governance and admin headaches.

Key aspects of MS Teams:

• Office 365 integration: Within one window, users can call upon a variety of key Office 365 apps and tools to help them work more effectively, customize Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
  
  
• Adaptation: Conversational bots are a feature of MS Teams that allow the user to interact with the web service through text, interactive cards, and task modules. If you already have a bot that's based on the Bot Framework, you can easily adapt it to work in Microsoft Teams.
  
  
• Flexible: Conversational bots are found to be incredibly flexible — conversational bots can be scoped to handling a few simple commands or complex, artificial-intelligence-powered and natural-language-processing virtual assistants. They can be one aspect of a larger application, or completely stand-alone.
  
  
• Security: MS Teams enforces team-wide and organization-wide two-factor authentication, single sign-on through Active Directory, and encryption of data in transit and at rest.
  Files are stored in SharePoint and are backed by SharePoint encryption. Notes are stored in OneNote and are backed by OneNote encryption. The OneNote data is stored in the team SharePoint site.
  
  
• Compliance: Teams have a wide range of information to help you with compliance areas, including communication compliance for channels, chats, and attachments, retention policies, Data Loss Protection (DLP), eDiscovery and legal hold for channels, chats, and files, audit log search, as well as mobile application management with Microsoft Intune.
  
  
• Azure Active Directory integration: There are many services that you may wish to consume inside the MS Teams app, and most of those services require authentication and authorization to get access to services. Users of Teams have user profile information stored in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) using Microsoft Graph. OAuth 2.0 is an open standard for authentication used by Azure AD and many other service providers.
  
  
• No extra cost to Office 365 users: Since MS Teams comes integrated with Office 365, no extra cost is to be paid to avail membership to Office 365.
  
  

Why use MS Teams for Businesses?

Microsoft Teams are the future of the Service Desk and SaaS industry because of the extremely user-friendly and the kind of work environment it provides between remote users or within a large business. Projects, production, and other business elements can benefit from Microsoft Teams.

While making use of MS Teams, there are two main options to consider:

• The Organic Approach: A business can choose to immediately implement Microsoft Teams in a “completely free for all” fashion where everyone in the company can do whatever they want with the platform, and the adoption and usage of the Microsoft Teams platform can grow organically.
  
  
• The Controlled Approach: This more managed approach involves mandating Microsoft Teams’ use for specific aspects of the company. It also involves tightly controlling those who can use it and who can do certain things within it, resulting in a phased rollout plan across the company.
  
  

Summary:

As an Organization, businesses can choose to do something involving both of these approaches or something somewhere in between. What is right for a particular business depends on its culture and use cases. Teams can be controlled and configured directly from the Teams admin center.

From the Users’ point of view, MS Teams is very intuitive and the learning curve is quite small compared to more complicated collaboration tools.

Since MS Teams have made it easy and simple to share documents with multiple or all members, custom training materials and business guidelines can be made available within the platform for new users or employees to access.

MS Teams is a powerful and extremely useful collaboration environment that will only get more popular. Microsoft Teams is included in Office 365 for free, so any Office user can enjoy all the benefits of this collaboration solution.

MS Teams bring simplicity to teamwork by collaborating, sharing, communicating, and doing it all under one platform.