With the workplace now expanding out from offices and onto kitchen tables, digital collaboration tools are more vital than ever. A coffee sales meeting has now turned into a Microsoft Team call and a lot of companies are being forced to adopt unfamiliar software to stay competitive. While there are a lot of technology offerings on the market that claim to meet your business's needs, many fall short at balancing the reliability, security, scalability, and affordability aspects.
Here at Wappo, we only recommend our clients to use the best and Microsoft 365 continually exceeds our expectations. It is a collection of tools that are proven to help your business communicate and collaborate effectively.
Microsoft Office 365
Recent world events have made it clear that companies need tools that provide them with the ability to keep working even if a physical office space is unavailable. A survey made by ConnectSolutions Survey revealed that 77% of remote workers report a greater productivity while working off-site, which means that even if the employees could work from the official company’s office space, would still be more effective to work from home. It’s safe to say that working remotely is in all our futures, so its important to have collaborative tools that make this change possible.
Everyone is familiar with the traditional Microsoft office suite of apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc). While these time proven apps are a must have for every business, Microsoft enhanced the software and released Microsoft Office 365. This cloud-based office suite is utilized in many businesses as it offers employees the flexibility to access the software on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and through the web! Microsoft Office 365 comes with traditional office apps, but it’s also bundled with new apps such as Microsoft Teams. The best part is that they are all integrated, they all work together so you can manage your operations in the best way possible.
If you have not moved to Microsoft 365, you will soon.
Microsoft Teams
Chat apps are not the ‘latest thing’ in the market, but they are improving and making way for seamless communication and are innovative approaches for sure. Team chat applications are no longer limited to organizing team conversations and searching topics but have become a way of life too.
An effective team chat app will deliver timely communication within your team, streamlined workflow, healthier employee engagement, and strengthens team relationships among other things. Even with all those benefits, there still a question on every business manager and /or owner mind – “How to collaborate effectively with my team?”. While there are many team chats with many helpful features, they still may not fulfill all your business needs. Let’s say you need to communicate with a specific group about a specific project on a recurrent basis; you might need to return to emails to keep track of all that has been shared and done for that particular project. Once again you could find some team chats that can partially help you, however none of them are a full collaboration and secure tool like Microsoft Teams.
Well, but what is Microsoft Teams?
Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that provides global, remote, and dispersed teams with the ability to work together and share information via a common space. Using an easily to navigate user interface, you can utilize cool features like document collaboration, one-on-one chat, and team chat. But its real power comes from its ability to be fully integrated with many other Office 365 services, such as SharePoint, Exchange, OneNote, Planner and even PowerBi to name a few. But it doesn’t stop there. Microsoft and 3rd party developers are consistently developing integrations with commonly used business apps so they too can be used within Microsoft Teams. This allows your staff to stop wondering what app they need to use. Microsoft Teams will be the Goto app for your Business.
Here are 5 things you should know about Microsoft Teams:
1) Collaboration Tool
Microsoft Teams was built for today’s diverse workforce. The methods that organizational teams use to communicate and collaborate has gone through immense changes over the years. Teams provides you with an open, digital environment that makes work integrated, visible, and accessible across the board.
2) Meeting Experience
The ability to meet virtually is an important and cost-effective feature for businesses today. Teams gives you a view of your scheduled meetings, the timing, the subject, and a list of other persons who’ll be attending. Also, available on both Android and iOS, Teams provides a simple and easy-to-use app that allows you to chat with your team via text, have a voice conversation, or a video meeting.
3) The Ideal Teamwork Hub
When you become a full member of an Office 365 Group, you will experience all the advantages of Office 365 including tools, such as PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Planner, OneNote, SharePoint, and Power BI.
4) Highly Customizable
Customization is an important feature for any application specially because all organizations are unique. This new tool can be tailored to meet all the unique business and cultural needs, this is a platform with options for extensibility and open APIs with general availability.
5) Improved Security
Security is another area in which Microsoft Teams stands apart from its competitors and ensures your peace of mind. You will always be provided with cutting-edge security and compliance capabilities when you use any of Office 365’s platform services. Your data is encrypted while in transit and at rest.
With all these benefits, is safe to say that Teams is the best cloud-based chat app. Beyond how groups communicate, Teams shapes how they organize and govern themselves, and how they manage, control, and collaborate on their content. Microsoft Office 365 comes with 20+ installed apps for your use which are vital for any organization as it contains tools that increase the efficiency of your organization departments.
Do you want to know more about Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Contact us to know more about how these applications can help you and your company.
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