By James Roney, General Manager, Dial a Nerd
I’ll answer your question shortly, but I am not going to explain cloud computing to you. The topic is over-worked and you can find hundreds of articles from 2005 onwards explaining what it is and why it is beneficial to many businesses.
I am rather going to assume that you know all about cloud computing and I am going to assume that you take advantage of the cloud service offerings and technology. If you don’t, call us, as we can likely lower your operating costs and improve your efficiencies easily. Furthermore, talk to us before you are convinced that an on-premise server is a way to go.
Now that I have that out the way, and I know you are already utilizing basic cloud services like Microsoft Email, One Drive and SharePoint to improve your business continuity, customer engagement and of course compliance, let’s talk a little about Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams is not just a chat platform Microsoft Teams is emerging as one of the most critically important communication tools of 2020 and here are some of the reasons why:
- Data and content are protected according to your business policies and compliance requirements.
- Live file editing and collaboration in real-time with multiple editors.
- System agnostic service that spans across all systems, iPad, iPhone, PC, Mac, or utilize the online version via a web browser of your choosing.
- Meeting management.
- Desktop sharing with the ability of remote control.
- Session recording.
- Whiteboarding.
- Planner integration.
- Email integration.
- Multi tenanted calls and Video conferencing.
- Coming soon, teams will replace your VOIP provider.
The list does go on a bit and I could easily go on, however, I believe the key to Microsoft Teams is the ease of usability because of its intuitive interface. No longer do you need to be a technophile to perform file sharing, do document collaboration or even remote control someone’s desktop. Microsoft Teams does a phenomenal job at bringing the core Microsoft applications into each chat, meeting and video conference and allows participants to view or edit live thus saving the hassle of emailing documents back and forth which is an absolute time waster! To drive efficiency, Microsoft Teams can import and use over 200 applications not even related to Microsoft and even allow you to integrate your applications to keep Teams the central collaboration hot spot of your business.
Let’s talk about meetings. Even though as a technology company we have been utilizing Teams since its inception in 2017, we often still fell into the habit of having meetings with customers, suppliers and vendors around a meeting table. In fact, as a relatively small business, we have seven meeting venues and before lockdown, these rooms were always blocked to capacity.
We were fortunate enough to be able to operate remotely during the lockdown, however, we were forced into using Microsoft Teams for our meetings. We presumed that this would be a strange way to operate, however, now that lockdown has been lifted to level 3 and we can work from our offices, we have chosen to operate remotely because we can communicate and collaborate effectively through Microsoft Teams. We have reduced our expenditure and operating costs and improved efficiency throughout our business.
In conclusion, Microsoft Teams is our new normal and helps us create a seamless experience which is driving our business to success by minimizing costs, maximizing efficiency and improving our relationships with our customers. Microsoft Teams can do the same for your business!
