With the significant move of businesses moving to working from home, there are excellent cloud based collaboration tools available. We have been using Microsoft teams for the last year, and it has significantly supported collaboration when we are already a team that works in different locations (we have two offices, homeworkers, and colleagues on customer sites).
Teams is accessible through a Microsoft license and the benefits we have seen as a business are:
- Increased flexibility – can be used from any device anywhere
- Easy to add new team members
- Allows both Individual and team chat. You can set up as many channels as you want based on your business needs.
- Document collaboration – which is useful when working on specific projects. This also helps with version control and colleagues can work on documents at the same time
- Integration with other Office 365 features such as Sharepoint and yammer
- Easy to use so team members can get up to speed quickly. Microsoft has clear accessible online training & guides too.
- Video calling and conferencing between your team members
- Video and internal voice calls are free
- External phone system capability (at additional cost) to allow you to make, receive and transfer calls between landlines and mobiles and receive inbound calls on real phone numbers to replace your office phone system.
- Overall we have seen increased productivity & visibility and it’s a significant tool used in our business
Our advice to start using teams today is:
1. Check you have an Office 365 license which includes Teams (Office 365 Business Premium, Business Essentials, E1, E3, E5 plans)
Contact us if you would like help with either upgrading your licenses to support teams, or increasing your number of licenses
2. Download the Teams app
3. Check out the Microsoft training
4. Download Microsoft Team’s quick start guide
If you have any questions on how teams can help your business transition to working from home please contact us
