IT pros sound off on collaboration during COVID-19

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic scattered the global enterprise, IT professionals have scrambled to keep distributed workforces humming.

According to a new Petri survey of IT professionals, communication and collaboration are the top challenges they face in the wake of COVID-19.

To fill that gap, leading developers of tools for videoconferencing and collaboration tools have been working overtime to establish their primacy in remote workplaces.

At the top of Petri.com readers’ lists: Microsoft Teams. According to Petri’s survey, Teams is their No. 1 platform for communicating with end users. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they’ve adopted Teams for IT management tasks, easily outpacing Zoom and Skype (which were cited by 19% and 12% of respondents, respectively).

Teams’ popularity among IT pros reflects its overall boost in adoption since the onset of COVID-19. In April, Microsoft reported a 70% month-over-month increase in the number of daily Teams users, from 44 million to 75 million.

Not surprisingly, July’s Microsoft Inspire conference kept the spotlight on Teams. As reported in a recent post, enhancements to Teams’ Power Platform are aimed to streamline the creation, deployment and management of apps within Teams. Meanwhile, Teams has added support for Power BI dashboards, which allows participants to access business intelligence collaboratively, and contextual search within Teams chats.

The July releases followed a March rollout of new features in honor of the platform’s third birthday, and an announcement that Microsoft was extending support for teams of 10,000 members, up from the previous limit of 5,000.

Petri’s survey points to a way forward for marketers who want to help their corporate customers adopt best practices for collaboration.

While Teams is a clear winner with IT pros for their own internal communications, most pros surveyed said they’re supporting multiple collaboration tools. What’s more, “shadow IT” creates additional complexity, as end users adopt collaboration platforms without the knowledge or support of IT departments.

To achieve mission-critical challenges for seamless remote communications, IT pros are best equipped to standardize their enterprises on the platform they know best — Microsoft Teams.

ISVs who help IT stakeholders master Teams’ new capabilities will also provide them with powerful new incentives to extend Teams reach across the geographical gaps COVID-19 has opened.