SCRIBE Online and Microsoft Teams

In 2017 Microsoft launched Microsoft Teams.  Its a free collaboration tool that brings together multiple different tools into one area and keep communications organized.  But, isn't this a SCRIBE Online blog?  Why are we talking about Microsoft Teams?  That's because we can use SCRIBE within Microsoft Teams to keep communications about our data migrations, integration and replications in one area.  Let's get started...

Download and install Microsoft Teams from this link.  Once installed open that application and right click on "Teams".  This will give you a pop up to create a new team.  For this demo we will call our team SCRIBE.  Input a description and set the privacy to either private or public.  Private - you have to invite people to your team.  Public - others in your organization can see the team and join it.  Here

is what you should see:

Clicking on "Next" will create your team.  After it is created you will get a pop-up to add more people.  For now we are going to skip this.  Now in your list of Teams you should see "SCRIBE" with "General" under it.  The general is referred to as a channel.

For this example we are going to work in the General channel.  But, if you want to add more channels, click on the "..." next to the SCRIBE team name and click on "Add channel".

In the large area to the right of the teams, you will see three circle images and a "Welcome to the team!" message.  Above that you will see, "Conversations", "Files", "Wiki", "+".  Conversations is where team communications will be logged in a thread style.  Files is where we can upload any files we create.  Wiki is where we can create an F.A.Q or keep simple notes.  The plus sign is where we can add new stuff to our team.  For every new item we add there will be a conversation thread created in the conversations area.  For our practice we are going to be adding 3 websites.  Do the following:

1. Click the "+"
2. Click on Website icon.
3. In the pop-up fill in the tab name (what will show in the navigation bar in teams) and URL.
4. Leave "Post to the channel about this tab" checked.
5. Click save.

Repeat the above 5 steps for each of these URLs:

• https://app.scribesoft.com
• https://help.scribesoft.com/scribe/en/index.htm
• https://dev.scribesoft.com/en/home.htm

When you are done you should see the following at the top of the team:

In the Conversations tab you should see:

At this point our SCRIBE team is setup.  We can log into SCRIBE online via the SCRIBE Online tab and create our solutions and mappings.  If you click on the little communication icon

in the top right corner.  It will open up the communication thread for the tab we are working in.  This way we can quickly see what other team members have said about this tab and what we have said. 

There is a lot more that we can do with Microsoft Teams and SCRIBE, but for this post, I just wanted to introduce the idea of using Microsoft Teams to increase communication.  I will leave you with a few things to look into that you can use in the SCRIBE team we setup:

• Add SCRIBE Status RSS feed to conversation area to get updates on the status of SCRIBE Online.
• Use Files to store the Google Drive Spreadsheet we can create using the SCRIBE Documentation tool.
• Use files to store backups of out mappings and solutions or add Source Control (TFS, VSTS, GitHub) to team to store them.
• Add other SCRIBE websites to the team.