Challenge 1: Emergency Response Collaboration

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Pre-requisites

To begin this challenge, you must have access to a Microsoft 365 subscription as described in the Pre-requisites challenge. Do not limit yourself to a particular license level, use all of the capabilities of Microsoft 365.

Description

Contoso has identified a glaring problem that information related to a specific emergency is not available in a consistent matter across the different response groups (e.g. First Responders, Logistics, Communications & Public Affairs, Headquarters, Legal, Engineering). Currently each group makes their own decisions about how to collaborate when an emergency takes place. The result is a bunch of email distribution lists and files stored in various locations, such as file shares, SharePoint sites, and external hard drives. Members of the response group often take on more than one role, so information needs to be available to the entire response team, organized by roles. For each type of emergency, Contoso has standard documents with common operating procedures.

The dispersed repositories also present challenges for the response team to search for specific resources. Often information and decisions get lost due to staff turnover, especially for shift related activities. Today, content is only shared via email with the local authorities. This often leads to people in the field, working with out of date documentation.

Additionally, the emergency response team has a need for shared action tracking (called the “Big Board”) which lists who has been assigned to do what. The Big Board allows the team to glance at what assignments are outstanding and where bottlenecks might be. The Big Board is often managed by a staff in Headquarters, who then periodically takes a photo of the board and distributes it via email throughout the day. This continues the theme of having stale information for people in the field.

During an emergency, the Public Affairs group often prepares a PowerPoint presentation to brief media agencies. It is hard to anticipate the number of attendees from the media as depending on the emergency, the number of interested parties could go from ten to thousands. These briefings need to be widely available and securing the meeting with login credentials is not necessary. The media participants need the ability to ask questions. Each session needs to be recorded and made available within Contoso. The HQ staff often review these sessions, after the fact.

Success Criteria

  1. Your team has configured Teams to store the information related to an emergency so that it is centralized for the specified roles.
  2. All members of the response team can easily find the common operating procedure document for reference.
  3. Contoso users can easily search for information across roles related to the emergency.
  4. During any shift change, an onboarded Contoso user can easily pick up and continue discussions from the previous shift.
  5. Your team has deployed a way for the response team to track shared actions.

Advanced Challenges (Optional)

Too comfortable? Eager to do more? Try these additional challenges!

  1. Demonstrate that a non-Contoso account (representing local authorities) can be invited and access Contoso content related to the emergency.
  2. Your team demonstrates a solution for the Public Affairs team to brief the media including Q&A with stored recordings available to HQ for review.

Learning Resources

Reference articles on Microsoft Teams: