Unleash your business’s potential with Microsoft Teams

Communication

Improving internal communication is a perpetual challenge for many businesses. It’s often made more difficult when your team don’t have access to the right tools, especially if some or all of them are working remotely!

There are countless applications out their all claiming to be the answer to your communication problems, but we’d advise you to look no further than Microsoft Teams. This all-in-one communication platform is MS 365’s most comprehensive and integrated tool for tackling those longstanding communication challenges.

Are communication issues preventing your business from reaching its productivity goals?

Businesses often get complacent when it comes to internal communication. Many view never-ending email threads and haphazard attachments as an unavoidable fact of life – but there is a better way!

Adopting new technology is often seen as challenging. We believe this results in businesses remaining within the application ‘ecosystem’ they are already familiar with, for fear that exploring new options might be more trouble than it’s worth. For MS 365 users this usually means staying on the familiar ground of the ‘Office apps’ – Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. Fortunately, however, many of the other applications within MS 365 require almost no learning curve whatsoever – they usually feature intuitive interfaces that inspire confidence in users within a couple of hours of first use.

We’re not having a go at Email; it remains a vital and very powerful communication tool and it’s not about to go anywhere any time soon. The problem lies in the fact that it is not optimised for collaboration. Email communication is clunky, siloed and often slow. The interface is not designed for quick-fire discussion, mass file-sharing or collaboration.

File-sharing, in particular, is one of the Email’s greatest shortcomings. Email attachments have size limits and when you send files via email you often lose administrative oversight – you don’t know where the file ends up, who’s seen it and it may eventually return to you in an unrecognisable form with multiple edits.

Solve your communication woes with the best tool available – Microsoft Teams

Ok, ‘Best tool available’ might be a bold statement, but if you’re a Microsoft 365 you really don’t have to look any further than Teams. It’s very neatly incorporated into the architecture of MS 365 so you never have to worry about compatibility issues again. Its compatibility with the Office apps, large range of built-in features and the ability to customise the experience by incorporating other tools and services into its interface makes it the only communication application you’ll really need besides Email. Here is an overview of its key features:

• Live instant messaging. An email will always be necessary for situations where formality is required, but how often do you use it to ask someone a quick question? Sometimes you just want to expedite the lengthy email ‘waiting game,’ and that’s where instant messaging comes in. Teams’ instant messaging lets you chat in real-time with groups of employees or individuals. See who’s available to chat thanks to the availability status feature, enable easy file-sharing thanks to OneDrive and SharePoint integration, and create a central discussion hub for group projects.
• Live Document editing. Document revision can be a tiresome business traditionally involving attaching files to emails and hoping for the best. You then receive the file back hours later with multiple incorrect changes, the file type has been changed and you can’t be sure that a copy hasn’t been stored locally on another computer. Teams let you fast track this tedious process with live document editing using the Office web apps. Get the team together and get that file sorted in minutes as opposed to hours. Maintain administrative oversight and control – the file never leaves the cloud so you’ll never have to worry about sensitive documents going missing or being edited beyond all recognition.
• Teams and channels. These are the built-in structures that let you organise and categorise discussions the same way you organise files in a folder. ‘Teams’ refers to the broad topic around which you gather a team of employees for collaboration. ‘Channels’ are effectively subcategories of the broader topics and are used as a filter for discussion pertaining to a narrower topic within the framework of the larger one. Control who is involved in the discussion with full privacy control – set chats to ‘public’ to give access to everyone, or grant access to a select group of people.
• Video and voice calling. Based on the ‘Skype’ platform, Teams’ audio and video calling feature allow you to host online gatherings of up to 250 attendees. Ideal for keeping a remote workforce engaged through weekly meetings.
• Single-pane-of glass communication. Teams allows you to consolidate various tools into a single interface. In addition to the ability to customise Teams with Microsoft applications it also offers compatibility with hundreds of third-party apps meaning your team can focus on the job at hand without having to open dozens of separate application windows.

Release your business’s potential with empowering tech choices.

Here at Cloud Nexus, we draw on over 20 years of experience in the IT sector to help the hundreds of businesses we work with unlock their true potential using technology. We help small and medium-sized enterprises increase their productivity, improve efficiency, and safeguard their digital assets often by helping them get the most of the technology they already have at their disposal.

We know Microsoft 365 inside-out, but we’re often dismayed by how few businesses utilise its full potential. Why not get in touch, and let us guide you through the options that may already be sitting on your PC waiting to be opened.