John C. Maxwell’s famous quote, “Teamwork makes the dream work” is often easier said than done. Working on any collaborative project is often time-consuming and quite frankly, frustrating.
Working remotely with your colleagues in some form has become the new normal and with this kind of set up, communication becomes a challenge. From misinterpreted instructions to unsynchronised processes, you’ll be left with a pile of unfinished workload.
With team collaboration being essential to a business’ success, you’ll need a platform to help you streamline all your tasks and communication. Luckily, you now have Microsoft Teams to support your collaboration needs and here are seven things why we think you’ll love it.
#1 Chat, call and meet in one place
Microsoft Teams is a new workplace chat-based platform in Office 365 that brings together people, conversations and content so they can collaborate anytime, anywhere. Your basic Microsoft Office such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and collaboration tools like SharePoint, Planner and Delve, are built within Microsoft Teams. There are available plug-ins too to integrate it with other Office 365 applications such as PowerApps and Flow for no-code business apps development and Power BI for easy, interactive report generation.
#2 Real-time communication and updates
Avoiding redundancy of tasks and duplicate outputs? Tired of chasing up people for updates? You can now put a pause to your seemingly endless thread of emails.
For lightweight task assignment and monitoring, Microsoft Planner in Teams allows you to give all your team members real-time visibility of all delegated tasks, deadlines and progress. Just like how you use mentions on social media platforms, you can tag people so they can get notified on updates on your tasks. If chats are not enough, you can organise a voice or video conference right on the Teams app.
#3 Centralised File Storage
Keep all your documents in one location with SharePoint pre-built into Microsoft Teams. Leveraging SharePoint’s co-authoring capability, it will allow you and your teammates to speed up the process of finalising documents by enabling you to edit it simultaneously. Once it is ready, you can start conversations about the changes made, make suggestions to improve it further and have it approved by the approving manager.
#4 Quick assistance from Bots
The next wave of AI is brought to life in Teams with Bots, an embedded assistant that interacts with Microsoft Teams users through chat. Instead of going around asking for information among your teammates, Bots is an effective and innovative way to make information available anytime.
#5 Expand collaboration with guest access
Working frequently with external collaborators such as customers, suppliers or partners? Expand your collaborative work outside of the organisation by using guest access in Teams, a conditional access for external parties. Microsoft Teams uses enterprise-grade security in Azure to make sure they can only access specific channels they are members of.
#6 Works on all major platforms
Microsoft Teams work not just for the Windows operating system, but it also works well with Mac/iOS, Android and even browser-based web clients. Access your files and collaborate seamlessly using your desktop, tablet or mobile phone.
#7 Available for free on Office 365
Lastly, we think you’ll love the fact that Microsoft Teams is free! Yes, you’ve read it right. It’s a free add-on available for Office 365 Business or Enterprise subscription. Like any other Office 365 app, your IT administrator just needs to turn it on so you can use it for the business.
Activate Microsoft Teams
If you have the qualifying Office 365 subscription, turn on Microsoft Teams today and see how much work can be done when you have the right tools for your people. Interested in learning more about Teams? Call 1800 126 499 or sign up here for a free 30-minute consultation with our experts in Office 365.
