Orchestry, is the platform that we use when we deliver our Microsoft Teams Delivery Accelerator to our customers. We wanted to shed some light as to why we selected it.

1.    It is beautifully designed

The first thing when you open up Orchestry is that it is beautifully designed and easy to use. The thought that has gone into the user interface is self-evident but when you hear Michal Pisarek, talk about it you can hear his passion too.

Take this example, each Team that is created has the Orchestry Team Information tab added. All the useful information that you need is here. Including, who is in the team, links to the SharePoint site, Planner, Calendar, Email and OneNote can be found here.

2.    It helps users make the right choice, be consistent and get their job done.

One of the common issues is the confusion there is about which service in Microsoft 365 should I use? It is completely understandable as there are always lots of different ways to approach something in Microsoft 365.

However, with Orchestry, you and your organisation can decide how you want to do for example projects, department, product, or social workspaces and then build a template. A user doesn’t have to think they can just request a new project workspace or product workspace.

Orchestry then ensures that we do not introduce common problems with Microsoft Teams for example having Teams with Orphaned Teams because there is only one owner. Having multiple teams for a project or product because the system will highlight those to the user before they request the site.

A few moments later they will have a site which is setup with the right documents, lists and signposts as to what they need to do next. That way the site is consistent, and they can get on with what they need to do rather than spending time getting everything setup.

3.    There is a central directory so that user can filter and find the right Team.

Hopefully, your Team implementation will grow to the point that there are hundreds of Teams and you are getting the value and benefit from the tool. However, if you do then you have a problem in that getting around and finding the right Team is hard.

Orchestry, solves that by providing you with a directory which is centralised and covers all the workspaces in your Microsoft 365 tenant. That means Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites are all there. The user can filter and favourite the workspaces that they use the most to find their workspace, site or team.

Of course, as you would expect it is all embedded in Teams.

4.    Control your Teams sprawl with the approval request process.

Out of the box, any user can create a Microsoft Team and this quickly gets out of control as you have lots of Microsoft Teams, Teams, called Marketing Department 1, Sophies Team, Jeffs Team.

Quickly you have Microsoft Team sprawl and users cannot find where to collaborate and put their content.

The approval request process in Orchestry guides your user through the process of requesting a team which can then be approved before it is created. This allows an administrator stop duplicate teams being created.

Also, as part of that process you can put in place naming conventions so that there is some structure to the names that are created, and this helps users find the right Team when they are looking to collaborate.

5.    Team templates can be configured and managed by the business

Too often IT become the bottleneck for the business being able to get things done.

Orchestry, has this fantastic feature, Live Templates. The feature allows a template such as a Project Workspace template to be created from another live site or Team. The template can be configurd to copy over all the information from Teams and the underlying SharePoint site or not.

When the workspace is created it takes a copy of the live template workspace and applies all the content to that workspace from the template.

This allows a user who is not a developer, administrator, and not technical to configure and tweak the template so that it works for the business. Changes can be made by the business as the business requirements change!

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