Moving from teleconferencing to the teleworking era with Microsoft Teams

The rise of the global coronavirus pandemic has created unparalleled opportunities for solution providers to drive sales of collaboration and Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, establishing video conferencing as an absolute must on remote working.

While many of us might feel comfortable with the temporary solutions for teleconferencing and teleworking, it is getting time for their full integration within the organizational infrastructure.

As companies across the globe search for an agile way to keep teams connected in the age of remote and mobile work, team collaboration tools are gaining popularity. These simple and convenient tools provide access to crucial features for employees to work seamlessly together, from instant messaging to video conferencing. Zoom and Microsoft Teams are two of the biggest competitors on the market; Zoom, a web conferencing software that facilitates high-performance video and audio conferencing both internally and externally, and Microsoft Teams, a collaboration tool designed to improve internal communication. 

Microsoft Teams is a popular choice for businesses that use Microsoft 365 products. It is packaged in with the Microsoft 365 suite and syncs up well with other Microsoft technologies. Improved communication is at the heart of Microsoft Teams, designed to make this cloud-based platform of integrated Microsoft tools a game-changer for organizations, as an enterprise communication tool that takes the waste out of traditional office collaboration.

The benefits of Microsoft Teams are wide-ranging. Many are related to increased utilization of time and optimization of team cooperation, while some are related to software safety and security in this new world; you can check them below:

Optimizing communication

Microsoft Teams brings targeted communication among teams, allowing real-time chat among selected team players within topic channels, removing the time lag between team members not able to read emails, and keeping only those involved in a certain task involved.

Increase productivity

You can keep the right people at the table in highly-focused collaborations with document retrieval built into the system.

No hardware and software limitations

  Microsoft Teams can be accessed anywhere, anytime, on any device; it is supported on Windows, Mac, as well as iOS, and Android. 

Integrations 

Microsoft Teams is fully integrated into Microsoft 365 – Office 365 is now called Microsoft 365. The entire Microsoft Office work family is available. This is a major benefit of Microsoft Teams. Applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Yammer, to mention a few, can be accessed.

Meeting and scheduling 

Have your existing appointments synced with other team members. Once your meeting is set up, you can talk about the meeting in a separate chat thread. You can agree on agendas and upload relevant documents, all within Microsoft Teams.

Digital Transformation enabler

 Microsoft Teams takes you along a digital transformation journey; being a cloud-based system, you can access information from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

Voice calling in Microsoft Teams 

Up to 250 of your employees can make high-quality voice calls at any time, even to external numbers on a desktop and mobile device simultaneously. Phone System offers a high-quality telephony experience in Microsoft Teams, offering full Private Branch Exchange (PBX) functionality, without complicated and expensive equipment, as everything is on the cloud!

Help Bots

Bots are here to help you remove the boring everyday tasks to save you time,  appearing just like any other team member to offer help as the T-Bot for frequently asked questions, Polly Bot to help with voting, and Hipmunk to arrange your travel plans.

Real-time document collaboration

You can collaborate and edit documents seamlessly. And in real-time, while documents are auto-saved within Teams, so no information gets lost.

Notifications

 Likes and mentions are highlighted on the Activity and Chat panes. This cuts out a large number of potential emails that you would otherwise have received.

Security

Microsoft Teams is very secure. The system offers built-in information protection for large enterprises to the high level that these organizations expect, using multi-factor authentication and secure guest access.

Customization of your workspace

 You can customize your workspace to include social media platforms such as Twitter. You can also enable news alerts pertinent to your geography. You can even integrate other cloud storage solutions like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Instant company updates

As many as 10,000 attendees can dial into important company announcements on video calls with a push of a button.

No extra cost for most Microsoft 365 users

If you already have a Microsoft 365 license, the basic Microsoft Teams feature comes free, while you can always add more benefits with an upgrade to Standard, or M365 Business Premium to better suit your business needs.   

If you are looking for productivity, collaboration, and boundless access, Microsoft Teams can be the right tool for you; it has many great benefits, as being focused and streamlined, highly secure as no information can be lost, as well as its complementarity to other MS tools already within Microsoft 365, that will enhance your productivity and lead you safely to the new era of remote working.

Want to know more about Microsoft Teams?