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Working remotely may seem ideal to most people. You’re working in the comfort of your own home with no commute and no dress code. Some say they are more productive with fewer office distractions. But, staying engaged with colleagues and effectively collaborating with your teams while remote can be challenging.
Microsoft Teams is a great tool to help you and your remote colleagues stay connected and working together without feeling remote.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Powered by the Microsoft® Cloud, Microsoft Teams is designed for teamwork and flexibility to bring together the best of Office 365 into a single workspace for working with people, managing conversations, maintaining files, and integrating Office 365 applications, so everyone has instant access to everything they need to successfully collaborate in the workplace.
Microsoft announces no-cost subscriptions
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced updates to the free version of Teams. These updates lift restrictions on user limits to help organizations who may be choosing to work remotely due to travel restrictions and other concerns. Read Microsoft’s announcement here.
See Microsoft Teams in action here
Key Microsoft Teams features and functionalities
- Fully integrated: The Office 365 applications that are used every day in your workplace ― like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Outlook ― are fully integrated into Microsoft Teams.
- Chat with a group: Start a thread where everyone is in the know. Anyone in the team can see information and join the conversation, and the occasional gif added to a thread always makes people smile.
- Reduce emails: No need to send any more mass emails to share information. You can quickly share a variety of information, from upcoming events that may be of interest to a broad group, r a training they may want to take, a blog or piece of information.
- Collaborate live in real time: How many times have you emailed a document to a group and received back four versions of the original? With documents in Teams, you can work on the same document and collaborate in real-time, and even see another user edit fields in Excel or add text in Word or PowerPoint.
- Collaborate internally and externally securely: You can be confident in the cutting-edge security and compliance capabilities that come with your Office 365 subscription, including Teams. You can customize your teams to be private or publicly available. Teams also includes advanced security controls that cover data-loss prevention, information barriers, retention policies, eDiscovery and more.
- Video conferencing: Be more engaged with your colleagues, even when you are remote. The blurred background feature is super helpful for those sitting in an area where there is lots of motion behind them.
- Access Teams across all devices: Collaborate on-the-go using the Team mobile app (iOS, Android and Windows). The easy-to-use app allows you to chat with your team via text, have a voice conversation, or a video meeting.
(photo: Microsoft.com)
If your organization is looking to quickly ramp up your organization’s work-from-home capabilities or if your organization is already using Microsoft Teams but need assistance with training, adoption strategies or long-term governance, Protiviti’s Teams Enablement Solution can help.
NEW! Protiviti is offering a one-day Teams Rapid Launch Workshop for clients interested in learning more.
- Overview of the capabilities and value of Microsoft Teams
- Analysis and assessment of existing environment
- High-level game plan to get your organization deployed on Microsoft Teams
Contact us today to schedule a workshop.
Learn more about our Microsoft Consulting Services here.
