Microsoft Teams is one of the newest members of the Office 365 collaboration family that seems to have started revolutionizing the workplace. Microsoft Teams enhances the spirit of teamwork in the business market.
Regardless of the size of your business, you can achieve more together with Microsoft Teams.Teams collaboration features bring immense value to the communication strategies of any modern workplace. Read on to learn more on how you can communicate more effectively with Microsoft Teams and help transform your business.
When you improve collaboration in the workplace, you create an ecosystem for innovation. Microsoft Teams enables staff to freely collaborate and share ideas as they work individually and jointly on various projects. Your projects will can get delayed or become redundant when employees waste several hours, days, weeks, or months trying to knit together information from different devices or/and software. In other words, if your staff members spend a lot of time looking for the right resources, they’re likely to rush to meet deadlines and in the process fail to put their best creative minds to work. Remember, the primary goal of working as a team is to boost efficiency. But, if for instance some of your team members are not aware of the latest developments on a particular project, it is almost impossible to collaborate effectively. Hence, the centralized collaboration workplace in Office 365 can free your various teams from these productivity bottlenecks.
Savvy organizations have adopted Teams for workplace collaboration and communication. The tool has proven to be an effective solution for group-file sharing, content creation, and seamless messaging/chats between users, especially in a digital workplace. End-users and IT admins have found the tool to be an integral Office 365 suite feature. Here are some of the business benefits of this cloud-based service for both IT admins and end-users.
With Microsoft Teams, you can keep everyone in the loop because it allows real-time messaging. You can
monitor team and private discussions in Teams threaded conversations and chat functionality. In fact, this is the Microsoft Teams core feature that is designed to improve collaboration and boost productivity.
You can @mention people when you want specific team members to see certain messages in one or multiple channels. Since everything is archived, even new members to group conversations can easily get up to speed with what is going on. Unlike traditional workplace chat platforms such as email-Outlook Groups, Teams ensures that every team member is updated in real-time.
Teams is an up-to-date and collaborative software platform that comes at a fraction of the cost of other
collaborative software. The service doesn’t come with upfront costs as it is part of the Office 365’s monthly
subscription payment model. In addition, it also benefits from the suite’s regular, automatic upgrades and
security patches. This means that the tool will never be outdated.
IT admins can plan their IT expenditure more easily with a subscription payment model, rather than when
investing in a standalone software as was the case with the old days of Office 2016. Businesses with Office
365 subscriptions such as Business Essentials / Business Premium, or Enterprise E1, E3 or E5 will have access to Teams as part of their Office 365 services package.
Secure
Just like other solutions in the Office 365 productivity suite, Teams has enterprise grade security features. Its security features include Single Sign On (SSO) on Active Directory (AD) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Data in transit and at rest is also protected through automatic encryption and secure-guest-access.
With Microsoft Teams you can also limit access to specific devices in your organization through its Conditional Access (CA) and regulates MFA domain joined devices. You can also set alerts and report on log data and audit events through the platform’s Audit Log, which integrates with Office 365 Security Compliance Center.
Moreover, Teams is built on the same cloud platform to that of the Office 365 suite itself. Meaning, both businesses, and individual users benefit from the security standards and advanced compliance of services such as:
• EU Model Clauses (EUMC)
• HIPAA
• SO 27001
• ISO 27018
• FERPA
Microsoft Teams Has Several Connectors To Microsoft And Other Services
Teams take advantage of the on-premise and cloud-based connectors of Azure. This means that you can seamlessly connect your business to more than 150 Microsoft and third-party services through Teams. These connections will help you collaborate with ease, source data, and receive vital updates. The network in Teams includes:
• Developer Tools: Azure DevOps, Stack Overflow, etcGives You Control Over All Work Through Mobile Device Management with Intune
With Microsoft Intune, your IT teams have substantial control over all the projects and tasks executed by mobile devices. Intune, included in Microsoft 365 plans, has mobile device management (MDM) capabilities that allow you to:
• Manage or control the mobile devices and workforce personnel gains access to your organization’s dataMicrosoft Teams is a feature-rich solution on both tablets and smartphones. Major mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android support the official Teams app. Your staff can, therefore, continue collaborating on-the-go without experiencing any roadblocks or data security concerns.
Makes Scheduling Easier
Since Microsoft Teams syncs well with Outlook calendar and can be integrated with Google Calendar, setting appointments or scheduling is easier, quicker, and more accurate. In addition, through its extensive list of connectors, you can also integrate it with other schedulers. Moreover, you don’t have to send individual invites to everyone as you can accomplish scheduling in a channel. However, meetings are automatically private and you need to send individual invites to attendees if you don’t choose a channel.
Microsoft Teams Lets Users Make Memes :)
With Teams, you don’t have to rely on other shoddy meme generator tools. This is a killer feature for your various messaging needs. The meme picker has some of the latest pop-culture memes and Office Drama memes. This is like an injection of some humor in a very serious, useful digital communication tool.
Find the Information You’re Looking for, Instantly!
The process of looking for the right tools, information, conversation threads, and content is time-consuming. Instead of having your employees waste valuable time as they search for crucial data, make collaboration at the workplace more effective by giving your staff members instant access to what they need to work efficiently through Teams. This intuitive Office 365 tool uses integrated search capabilities and access to Planner, OneNote, and SharePoint, enabling your empoyees to find anything they need instantly. This is possible because all documents or files shared in Teams is saved to the cloud. Meaning, employees will be more productive by working with the latest file versions without the need for searching.
Get Qualified Feedback
You can only evaluate your team’s performance by analyzing feedback. The feedback-based analysis is more qualified and viable than relying on try and error approaches. Unfortunately, some team members may be held back and eventually lag behind in delivery because they’re waiting for feedback and sign-off to proceed with their respective tasks. A lot of back and forth scheduling burns up valuable working time. Even when they do schedule conference calls and edit project documents based on the delayed feedback and
send out the revised versions, most of them end up wasting time waiting for sign-off. With Microsoft Teams they can set up online meetings with decision-makers or use private chats to quickly collaborate, share important project documents and secure approval in real-time. Project managers can edit and finalize project documents on-the-spot through the integrated side-by-side chat and notifications.
Bring Relevant Information into Teams
It is much easier and faster for team members to leverage specialized content and apps, allowing them to tailor their workspaces. For instance, they can add the Power BI dashboard and Word document tabs to Teams to take quick action with bots. You can bring relevant info into your Teams hub for better teamwork with apps such as Trello and Jira. With Teams data encryption, multi-factor authentication and its built-in security features, it is easy to do all these integrations. The frictionless sharing capability of Teams makes great ideas exceptional. In other words, it lets you embrace the benefits of lean, and highly efficient teams. When you seize the potential for intense innovation and support a collaborative culture, your organization can:
• Open more doors to the ideation pipeline
• Get to market fast
• Deliver better products
• Improve customer experiences
If you feel you can leverage these Microsoft Teams collaboration and communication benefits to actively foster a more modern workplace in your organization, we can help. Clear Concepts is a Managed Service Provider and a Microsoft Gold Partner that offers cloud products and services. Clear Concepts has extensive expertise and knowledge that will help you get more familiar with how Microsoft Teams can be beneficial to your organization.