What Microsoft Teams Collaboration can do for your business

22 Apr 2021

Achieving Teams Collaboration at the digital workplace was ever challenging and wondered technology update every business in the world trying to adopt due to the disruption caused by the Covid-19 in normal work culture. Several tools are available today as a solution for achieving collaboration – Zoom, Amazon Chime, Slack, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams are amongst the leading solutions in the business to achieve cross-functional collaboration in the organization.

Microsoft Teams, however, has become the solution of choice because of its cost-effectiveness (comes packaged with Office 365 suite), Flexibility in collaboration, cross-functional collaboration, and quicker adoption from all fronts for teamwork enhancement.

With the vast pool of tools that are available, Organizations are combining a different set of tools to achieve real-time collaboration between remotely located employees and cloud-based data and document management systems, which is knowing or unknowingly making you.

• Spend much time on tool-based collaboration.
• Increase investments due to multiple tools
• Scatter for support and vendor coverage
• Compromise usage leading to sub-par employee experience
• Lose focus on the primary objective – doing your work productively

These challenges typically grow exponentially with an increase in the number of tools. It’s ironic, that we originally buy the solutions to help increase collaboration but it is understood quite quickly that an increased number of solutions proportionately decreases the chances of adoption resulting in the decreased joint effort.

And with the ongoing global situation, the CIO has a nightmare uphill task to get the ROI and adoption in place. These are only some of the challenges causing failures in getting combined teamwork done and this is where the businesses with modern work culture need to improvise their business outlook and strategy of digital transformation by considering a solution that unifies with your existing eco-system.

Microsoft teams platform provides you a complete hold on the things going around you at a single location including chats, custom applications, existing office applications, workflow approvals, custom solutions, calling, calendar, and task planning capabilities; all in the same interface. Organizations that have adopted successfully have been reporting increased productivity and employee engagement like never before because of the flexibility and solutions achieved by using Teams for collaboration.

Some of the features in Microsoft Teams are:

• Bring all collaboration tools together: Teams are being admired by most business leaders due to its ability to build synergy between team members. For the businesses depending on third-party tools, Microsoft stands as a single solution with allowing users to either migrate to Office 365 tools to get together through emails, chat, documents, or to combine their third-party tools with required Microsoft services.
• Access at a single location: Microsoft has a different set of tools and definitely organizations will be using MS Excel, MS Word, and PowerPoint in their daily tasks. As a continued part of it, many businesses will also be using SharePoint, Skype for business, OneDrive, Outlook, etc., for collaboration purposes. Thus, by opting the teams for business collaboration users can access all of these tools at a single location which will make them create, share, view, and edit documents & files easily.
• Collaboration with external users: Are you still on conventional methods to communicate and share docs, files with external users? Then you need to give attention to this – Microsoft has recently announced the retirement of Skype for business on one of its ignite events and giving priority to Teams because of its ability to connect with external stakeholders, consultants, clients effectively without compromising security concerns of data and documents. Where the chats, groups, documents access of external users can be controlled by admins through access management.
• Matching all your needs: Yes, Teams will match all your needs in establishing group chat & private chat collaboration, document collaboration for secured data & document sharing and accessing, planning with team members for project collaboration, video conference & presentation, content collaboration, etc. For achieving a successful collaboration in the business environment.
• Security Setup and Governance: Microsoft provides additional capabilities over the default Azure AD with Data Loss Prevention, Advanced Threat Protection, Azure Sentinel, Compliance Rules, and Labeling capabilities along with strong monitoring and Governance capabilities.
• AI Backed ChatBots: These are the solutions that assist you to automate a lot of your work processes and simplify the operations that require integrations with several systems. These AI-backed chatbots typically can assist you in your daily mundane activities without breaking a sweat.
• Integration with Power Apps and Other External Applications: Another cool thing about Teams is, it can connect with any web application directly within teams, access custom Power Apps applications, Power Automate workflows, several 3rd party application connectors, and reports from tools such as Power BI that make Teams the only solution that people need to access.
• Personal and group collaboration: Teams have been divided into two forms personal and public – if you want to share documents with specific groups then you can create a group in teams and share docs with them using the planner for continuous access which are directed to SharePoint. And you can share docs on private chats for personal collaboration where these files will be directed to the users OneDrive which cannot be accessed and shared without your permission.

Do you want to review if you are using Teams to an optimal level? Get in touch for any Teams consulting and migration services, and we can assist you to build a future-proof roadmap that can propel you in the direction you want to be.