IT Solution Provider Champion Invests Big In Microsoft Teams Services

‘Microsoft Teams use has exploded because of COVID. Microsoft now has 75 million users a day utilizing the Teams platform. We‘ve seen a massive explosion in Teams use by small businesses and enterprises,’ says Chris Pyle, CEO of Champion Solutions Group.

The MessageOps business unit of Champion Solutions Group is investing heavily in services around Microsoft Teams as that platform continues to grow because of the work-from-home movement spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

That focus on Microsoft Teams takes advantage of Team Captain, a new IT governance and security platform recently introduced by the MessageOps business as a simple graphical dashboard to help clients stay organized and secure, said Chris Pyle, CEO of Boca Raton, Fla.-based Champion Solutions Group.

Team Captain itself is part of Champion‘s Inscape Microsoft 365 management platform, which currently services just over 1 million users, Pyle told CRN.

[Related: The 10 Biggest Microsoft Teams News Stories Of 2020 (So Far)]

In addition to working directly with business end users, Inscape is also available to other solution providers looking for ways to better manage their Microsoft 365 clients, Pyle said.

Champion Solution Group acquired MessageOps nearly 10 years ago when it was a three-person shop, a move that helped the solution provider transition from what in the past was a 100 percent focus on the IBM business to the Microsoft cloud business, he said. MessageOps is now Champion‘s Microsoft cloud business unit, he said.

Champion, No. 188 on CRN‘s Solution Provider 500 list, is now making Microsoft Teams a priority service of its MessageOps business, Pyle said.

“Microsoft Teams use has exploded because of COVID,” he said. ”Microsoft now has 75 million users a day utilizing the Teams platform. We‘ve seen a massive explosion in Teams use by small businesses and enterprises.”

Over the years, the MessageOps business has migrated over 7 million users to Office 365 and now Microsoft 365, Pyle said.

“We saw Microsoft Teams growing, with clients saying they wanted to add governance, see how many sites are active or not active, and so on,” he said. ”We said, ‘What about a Microsoft Teams portal?’ The said that would help, but it’s not enough.”

As a result, Champion Solution Group and MessageOps developed its Team Captain tool in-house, Pyle said.

Team Captain provides Microsoft Teams usage insights by company, department, or individual user, and provides a way to monitor user productivity and identify training opportunities, he said.

Team Captain provides information on the total number of teams an organization has, with detailed statistics on how many active, inactive, orphaned, archived, public, and private Teams a company has, along with information on the number of Teams by creation data.

Businesses can also get granular insight on such things as which Teams have no owners, which applications a team is using, latest activities, which Teams are sharing information externally, which externally-shared links have been approved, and what devices the users are using.

Team Captain is one of a number of container-based applications developed by Champion Solutions Group developed for its Inscape platform, Pyle said. That allows them to be sold individually, he said.