While there are many collaboration platforms available, Teams stands head and shoulders above the rest. Best of all, it is included with Microsoft 365.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration ecosystem that includes online meetings, document sharing, instant messaging, real-time team collaboration, and much more. It provides a space for teams to be able to make creative decisions and to communicate quickly, easily, and effectively. Teams provides a fully shared workspace which makes communicating easier to achieve, and comes with core components that make it stand out from other collaboration platforms such as:
- Channels and Teams – Microsoft Teams is made up of teams with channels as a subset of teams, By default they consist of conversation boards, file storage area and a wiki – so as not to dilute away from conversations.
- Instant Messaging: a chat facility – this is commonly found in most collaboration apps as well as in Teams.
- Screen sharing and video calling – with multi-user real-time collaboration.
- Online meetings can host up to 10,000 users in the Live meetings feature – this can include anyone from outside an organization. This feature also has a scheduling tool, note-taking app, file-uploading facility an in-meeting chat messaging between participants. For Teams Online meetings, the maximum number of participants is 300.
- Audio conferencing – many collaboration platforms lack this feature, but with Microsoft Teams anyone can join an online meeting via their phone with audio conferencing. The dial-in numbers available cover many geographical areas, so that even those who are on the go can participate in online meetings or calls with no internet required.
- A full suite of telephony features – organizations do not need to look for different VOiP vendors with Teams, as it can completely replace organizations existing phone system (additional licensing is required for this feature).
- Microsoft Lists: A brand-new lists feature – Microsoft announced during Inspire that they are creating and launching a new lists app for businesses that use Teams and Microsoft 365.
- Microsoft Teams is like the popular collaboration tool Slack and part of a large ecosystem providing seamless integration into other productivity applications that we all know and love, such as Office 365.
Why Should Your Organisation Make Use of Microsoft Teams?
Organisations should consider using Microsoft Teams because of its user-friendliness and the fact it an facilitate a work environment between remote users or within large businesses. In the post COVID-19 world where more employees are working remotely and from home, it is crucial to ensure team cohesion using Teams. Productions, projects, and other business elements can benefit from Microsoft Teams immensely, and it can often be the difference between business continuity or not being able to trade, especially due to COVID-19.
Teams is very user-friendly and straightforward to use with little to no set up required. That said, there should still be careful consideration as to how organisations utilise Teams before rolling it out to their end users.
Proventeq can provide tools and professional services to ensure the ongoing creation & management of Teams adheres to a Governance framework, minimising the risk of unused Teams data duplication, data leak and inadvertent sharing of data externally by leveraging the wider Microsoft 365 security & compliance ecosystem.
As Microsoft Teams are underpinned by SharePoint sites, Proventeq can provide migration services to ensure that collaboration, project and working sites in SharePoint transition into Microsoft Teams with corresponding Channels helping your teams collaborate more effectively, but still providing a formal document management structure.
Finally, Bespoke training on Teams can be provided, as well as Teams customer success programs to help drive end-user Adoption.
No matter how simple a tool is use, change can always be daunting, and we at Proventeq apply various techniques to understand your user personas, then tailor training accordingly.
To sum up, Teams is an extremely useful and powerful collaboration environment that is only set to grow in popularity in the post COVID-19 world as more employees continue to work remotely from home. It brings simplicity to teamwork by allowing collaboration, sharing and communication all under one platform.
Moving Forward
The committed team at Proventeq breaks down silos by providing a highly effective experience for utilising and leveraging information that is stored in any system or diverse repositories. These systems include ECM, ERP, CRM, file-sharing services, network folders, SharePoint, and other repositories.
Contact us today to set up a 1-hour discovery call on the “Art of the Possible’ with Microsoft Teams.
