Microsoft Teams – Enhancing Productivity and Efficiency Across Industries & Verticals

 

With an increasing number of organizations looking to adopt innovative and new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has emerged as a great tool for meetings and collaboration. Such is the popularity of Teams that Microsoft recently announced that the usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users (by the end of April 2020), a massive increase from the 44 million users in the previous month.

In this blog, we explore more about Microsoft Teams and how it can be used to enhance productivity and efficiency across industries and verticals.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams, a part of standard Microsoft 365 subscriptions, is essentially the end-to-end collaboration tool that enables both offices-based and remote staff to collaborate with designated groups of employees or employees within online workspaces in the Microsoft Teams application.

Since it is a fully cloud-based tool, it can be accessed anywhere via the desktop or mobile application on both Android and iOS devices and is continuously updated with new features.

Why Use Microsoft Teams- Business Benefits And Advantages

Here we are discussing some of the key reasons why Microsoft Teams offers an excellent solution as compared to other video conferencing tools

1. Teams is fully integrated With Office 365

Similar to other Microsoft products, Teams integrates effortlessly with Office 365, which comes very handy if you’re already using that for your business. Varied Office 365 applications used in day-to-day work such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word, OneNote, Outlook, and SharePoint are fully integrated into Microsoft Teams.

2. Integrate various third-party applications quickly

Microsoft Teams supports several third-party applications such as Zendesk, which offers you the functionality of integrating Teams into various other areas of your business for a smooth and streamlined process and communication.

Other examples of other third-party applications include Polly, Smartsheet, Asana, Zoom.ai, and many more. These apps are equipped to cover the needs of many multiple teams in businesses, from marketing, sales, IT to analytics.

3. New Power BI Tab for Teams

The new Power BI tab for Microsoft Teams has some excellent new features that allow everyone in a channel or chat to easily find and track the data they require to complete their day-to-day tasks. Further, the new tab also adds support for reports in Power BI apps, reports in the new workspace experiences, and paginated reports.

4. Collaborate live in real-time with Teams

Real-time presence changes are an excellent feature of Teams, especially for people moving from Skype to Business Online. This is simply because the present changes in the app happen very conveniently and smoothly. It allows you to complete work in real-time with your colleagues as you chat together and work on business files through Teams, instead of taking forever emailing updates.

5. Microsoft Teams Bots

To take advantage of artificial intelligence and easy automation features, Teams offers pre-made Microsoft Teams bots. Among these, some of the best bots you should know about include

· Whoot: It is a bot that can answer all the questions about your colleagues, like who knows about the current incentives for your sales team, etc.

· Polly: Polly is a simple bot that polls your team members and helps you to keep track of employee engagement.

· Stats bot: It is an analytics bot that delivers scheduled reports via sources such as Google Analytics.

All in all, the key benefit of Microsoft Teams for businesses is that it has a range of technical features along with an intuitive interface to facilitate a seamless work environment between remote users or within a large business.

Everyone from project teams, productions, and other business elements can benefit from Microsoft Teams. It is an ideal tool for your business to support remote working, empower collaboration, increase productivity and promote teamwork.

Example of Industries Using Microsoft Team’s Effectively

There are multiple businesses out there, from educational groups, automobile, retail companies, biotech, and pharmacy to manufacturing brands using and customizing Microsoft Teams to suit their specific industry, with developer templates specifically designed for their respective verticals. For instance, there are Teams templates available for-

· Retail companies

· Education groups

· Project Management

· Government agencies

· First-line workers (Shifts)

· Healthcare (with HIPAA compliance

Here are some of the top industries that are using Teams to their advantage-

· IT Services and Computer Software

Microsoft Teams in IT services and computer software allows seamless integration with various third-party and line-of-business applications, thus enabling organizations to solve their specific business needs.

This brings collaboration and teamwork to a whole new level, offering users different ways to tackle and address any collaboration use case. For instance, the IT and computer software industry can use Teams integrations with Power Automate to automate routine and repetitive tasks, Forms to efficiently collect employee/ customer feedback, SharePoint to create guidelines/ instructions, and much more.

· Healthcare and Hospitals

Organizations that heavily rely on shift-based work, such as healthcare and hospitals, benefit from a native application available in Teams called Microsoft Shifts. The tool is fully integrated and operated via Microsoft Teams.

First-line workers can utilize it to chat quickly, review team updates, access relevant training and collateral through the convenience of the traditional Microsoft Teams desktop, mobile clients, or web.

Another powerful feature of Shifts’ is the ability for administrators to conveniently create a shared calendar in Teams that maintains employee schedules, allows employees to swap shifts, manages time-off requests, and enables employees to punch in and out at a time clock function.

· Marketing

Marketing, in general, requires a combination of review processes, event planning, content creation, and project management into one department. However, bringing this all together in one platform enhances collaboration manifolds.

Microsoft Teams makes it quite simple to add people temporarily to the Teams for taking input on campaigns, leading to higher ROI and better-targeted campaigns.

· Higher Education

Microsoft Teams can be instrumental in providing educators and higher Ed institutions with the tools needed to create and continue various traditional learning programs outside of the classroom.

Although the core capabilities of Microsoft Teams offer the ability to maintain communication and collaboration, higher educational institutions can also get the advantage of various other features that are only available to organizations in this category. For instance, it offers unique types of Teams templates that can be created based on the Team purpose, such as

Class Teams: This offers a robust collaboration platform for students and educators to share content with a known look and feel similar to a conventional teaching setup.

Staff Teams: These are designed for administration and department heads to collaborate with educators and other staff members.

PLC (Professional Learning Community) Teams: These are used for educators to collaborate on joint projects/activities where permissions are set equally for all members.

· Procurement Process

The procurement process can be managed and simplified with Microsoft Teams to a great extent. The tool allows procurement teams to communicate with other departments regarding new purchase management.

Further, it can also make quick reports with supporting documentation, work on quality assurance with a specific team and create an ideation group to begin procurement adjustments.

· Non-profit Organizations

Microsoft Teams for non-profit organizations comes in handy in collaborating with the internal and external team in a completely secure way. It allows non-profit teams to collaborate using audio, chat, and video calls and integrate seamlessly with Outlook and Microsoft Office.

While in a meeting, you can conveniently chat with other participants and even share files. Apart from this, the tool allows you to record meetings and automatically store them in Microsoft Stream (another Office 365 feature)

Conclusion

Overall, Microsoft Teams is an excellent tool that makes collaboration much easier by dividing your business into different Channels, Teams, and Collaboration methods. If your business is looking for a powerful cloud-based collaborative workspace for distributed users, Microsoft Teams offers a perfect solution.

Teams come with an excellent mix of collaborative, communication-specific, and automated tools to help businesses bring together their teams in every type of (in-person or remote) circumstances. If you think Teams is the right solution for your business or your customers’ needs, contact us at TRNDigital today to get started without much hassle.