If you have Office 365, then chances are you have Microsoft Teams - yet despite a world-wide daily user base of over 13 million people, many organisations have not yet discovered this transformative application.
Read more for tips on why this app can be a winner for your organisation, and how to make sure it's implementation will be a success.
What is Microsoft (MS) Teams?
MS Teams is a group collaboration application, where people who work on projects or teams together can communicate, share and meet online. The comparison with the bulletin boards of the pre-social media age are fairly accurate, but only covers a small portion of the ground that MS Teams covers.
Where does the MS Teams functionality stem from?
Remember the MSN Chat instant messenger application?
For those who were chatting online some 15 years ago, the spirit of MSN Chat lives on in MS Teams. Skype for Business (aka Lync) Microsoft’s enterprise-grade Unified Communications application; combining address book, telephone and instant messaging functions, has now been incorporated into MS Teams.
All modern collaboration features are included, such as the ability to share screens and applications, conduct online meetings (conference calls) and more. With MS Teams users can collaboratively edit documents, and enhance content with emojis and GIF animated images.
For some organisations MS Teams has replaced phone systems, instant messenger applications, Facebook groups, network file shares and email.
MS Teams doesn't have to replace these systems, it works just as well complementing them.
Top 6 reasons to use MS Teams
1. A single place for collaboration
MS Teams gives you ONE place where you can contain conversations, documents, meetings and meeting notes, phone calls and conference calls, task/project management and many other features all together.
MS Teams makes it easy to search within subject streams, and multiple Teams within a single organisation can be operated concurrently.
2. Merges naturally with Microsoft Office and data systems
MS Teams is a natural fit with other communications platforms such as Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive; Office applications such as Word, Excel and Project, and data systems such as PowerApps, Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Flow.
3. Keeps your team focused and engaged
If you've ever tried to share a conversation from Outlook with someone looking over your shoulder you'll know how difficult it is to link all the email threads together into a single coherent conversation.
Channels define a specific topic, or focus of activity in MS Teams, showing you the chronological order you need but working from a subject-first mentality rather than the scattered chronological-first mentality of traditional email.
Working together in MS Teams is flexible and fun, allowing for emojis and GIFs, along with other features available through Apps.
4. Stay in the loop
Messages posted to a channel in MS Teams can be a regular message to all, but can also be addressed to an individual through the use of the @ symbol. This allows the team to be aware of what's going on (like a carbon copy) but also alerts the tagged person for action.
Private messages can be sent person to person or between a group, where a carbon copy/organisation-wide conversation isn't appropriate.
Messages are easily searchable within a channel.
5. Files together, on subject, in one place
Files relating to the subject of the Channel are all together under the one subject, searchable for future use and editable for all with access. With Apps and connectivity with systems such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, workgroups can put it all together, getting the benefits of MS Teams along with the portability of cloud data storage.
6. MS Teams is portable and flexible
MS Teams is not just available to use on a mobile device, it's easy to use while mobile. Traditional applications can be difficult to use on a mobile phone, while MS Teams is designed for mobile devices, providing an experience consistent with both the MS Teams desktop application and the web interface available through your preferred browser.
Our team can help with your MS Teams
Whether your goal is to run a simple installation of MS Teams or a fully-integrated version connected to your CRM and unified communication system with custom dashboards, our software development team and our Business Technology Managers are available to make your MS Teams roll-out a success.
Give us a call on 1300 307 907 or contact us via the form below.
