Designed to improve teamwork and boost collaboration, Teams is now used by over 120,000 worldwide. Teams provides a comprehensive, collaborative solution that boosts productivity and efficiency. With a cloud-based architecture, Teams can be accessed anywhere—and is supported on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. Office 365 comes in a free version and commercial version, depending on the number of users per month and the tier of customer services needed.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a multi-channel text, audio, and video, collaboration platform integrated into Office 365. Through Teams, employees can collaborate with all of their different groups in a single dashboard. Employees can chat in a shared chatroom, share files and graphics, send instant messages, voice chat, and hold video conferences. Teams is intended to consolidate communication activities, working with Office 365 to provide a complete collaborative environment. Even better, mobile and cloud functionality means that Teams can go wherever the team is.
Microsoft Teams Business Benefits
What are the benefits to switching to Teams? While there are many collaboration tools out there, Microsoft Teams is uniquely well-suited to the modern office ecosystem. With some extra Office 365 education, it can become a powerhouse suite that drives a company’s productivity. Here are just a few of the ways in which it outpaces the competition.
Microsoft Office 365 Integration
With Office 365 integration, Teams can combine all the power of Microsoft Office 365 into a single solution. In terms of communication, Teams is able to connect assets such as calendars, documents, and emails—in addition to internal chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. MS tools such as Word, Excel, Skype for Business, and PowerPoint are all accessible within Teams, and SharePoint, OneNote, MS Planner, Power BI, Delve, and Microsoft Graph. In short, it can provide access to all the powerful Microsoft solutions that many businesses have become reliant on.
Rather than having to track down other employees or see what they’re working on, teammates will be able to see who is online and their current priorities—and they can directly launch chat, calls, or video chats from the Teams interface. Employees in other offices can connect with a single mobile device to any of the above Office 365 solutions.
Meeting and Scheduling Tools
Through its robust integration features, Teams can be directly integrated into the Microsoft Calendar—providing better scheduling services for team members. Appointments can be scheduled directly within the platform and meetings can be launched from within the calendar. Additionally, Teams supports project management solutions such as MS Planner, to create a more robust environment in which to track milestones and tasks. Professional learning communities can assist in finding reliable, third-party integrations and plug-ins for additional productivity tools.
Real Time Document Collaboration
When using Teams as a hub for teamwork, it’s never necessary to repeatedly ask other employees for documentation. Instead, team files will remain in conversation history—and you can easily search for documents through the Teams platform. With integration to solutions like Microsoft Documents and SharePoint, you have built-in document management services. Additionally, the features of MS Office 365 commercial make it possible for multiple employees to work on the same documents at the same time, without fear of overwriting data or losing data.
Enterprise Level Security
Security and compliance are the foremost of concerns for many businesses. Teams and all other Office 365 tools meet the compliance standards of HIPAA BAA, ISO 27001, ISO 27018 and SSAE 16 SOC 1 and 2 report. With better security and regulatory compliance, you can worry less about managing your documents and focus on what’s really important: revenue-generating activities. This further gives advantages to using Teams for education, health, or finance sectors.
The IT Advantage
Teams can radically alter the playing field for IT professionals. IT professionals are able to manage all of an organization’s communication and collaboration from within the Teams infrastructure and architecture, thereby reducing the amount of administrative time they spend on each task. By integrating the IT department with Teams, an organization can create a tech department that is accessible and responsive.
Through PowerShell and paid Office 365, IT administrators will no longer need to be licensed for teams to run cmdlets, as long as they’re a global or team services admin. They can also manage teams that they don’t own or belong to, adding functionality for day-to-day management and maintenance.
Conclusion
Having strong collaboration both off-site and on-site is critical to the performance and productivity of any business. Through its Office 365 integration and best-in-class collaborative solutions, Microsoft Teams is able to do just this. Teams leverages the power of Office 365 in a consolidated, continuously connected environment, making it easier for team members in any location to connect with and communicate with each other. As modern offices continue to grow in size and complexity, the Teams advantage becomes even more significant.
View our on-demand webinar, Gaining Control Over Your Microsoft Teams Management.