Microsoft Teams: Optimize the Cloud User Experience

Microsoft Teams: Optimize the Cloud User Experience

The pandemic has forced all of us to manage a remote workforce, but many of these transitions were rushed and without a plan. Take time now to evaluate how you can optimize the cloud user experience – for everyone in your organization.

The good news – If your company uses Microsoft (and who doesn’t?) you already have so many tools within that suite that you don’t need to be spending additional funds and training time on external programs and apps. (Check out our recent article about how optimizing Microsoft lowers your total cost of ownership of IT.)

Plus, Microsoft Teams is the ultimate collaboration hub – bringing groups of people around ideas and projects, no matter where they’re located.

We’re seeing that many companies are using Teams, but not to its fullest potential. Your Microsoft Teams environment has a wealth of benefits…

…all included with your license:

  1. Virtually brings people around ideas. The ability to assemble the right people to brainstorm, plan, collaborate, and document, with no geographic constraints – this is optimizing the cloud user experience. Teams has built-in organic efficiencies so a project lead can assemble his/her private group where only these individuals have access to the work in progress.
  2. Video and audio conferencing and recording. There are other platforms providing these services, but wouldn’t you rather hold these meetings within your own secure environment? Using Teams, you can optimize the cloud user experience for everyone – record the meeting, download transcripts, easily review sections of the video, memorialize the session.
  3. Fully secured business platform with private hostingTeams is a secure, cloud-based infrastructure, fully HIPAA compliant for Healthcare companies. Your organization’s meetings and conversations are private – why have them anywhere else but within your secured environment?
  4. Memorialization of instant messages. Wonder what happens to those casual chats where ideas are hatched? Teams provides a chat channel within each specific team for those project-related spontaneous conversations. Nothing gets lost – chats, ideas, comments are all saved within the project.
  5. Shift of control – into the right hands. Before the cloud, data storage was in the hands of the IT department. Using Teams, the project leaders have control of all the proprietary information related to a specific project.
  6. Quarterly compliance documentation. Your projects need to follow compliance standards. With Teams, you easily store, submit, review critical reports, securely.

And many more benefits!

Say good-bye to the yellow folder

Let’s look at an example of Teams in action: Microsoft Teams Meeting

Your company has a new challenge that needs a solution, fast. Yet the challenge is complex and requires innovation. You select two of your most creative-minded individuals as project leads and ask each of them to come up with a solution.

They each create their Team, and give it a name. They invite individuals of their choice to be part of the team. They schedule meetings, open a chat conversation, start brainstorming. The team devises a strategy, their goals, their timeline, project specs, documents – all stored within their team. Totally private and secure. All the project work, memorialized, in one place. When it’s time to present their solution, they can invite others into their private environment, even if those individuals are external to the organization.

This is oversimplified, of course, for demonstration of optimizing the cloud user experience. As the business owner, you set the parameters for starting a team, such as “one member of the C-suite must be included in each team”. Ultimately, each user within a team shines – their collaboration efforts memorialized, with no lost documents, no forgotten casual chats.

As a Microsoft Partner, Prone 2 Dream’s goal is to help our clients fully optimize the tools they already have within their Office 365 suite. (You’re already paying for it – utilize it to lower your total cost of ownership!)

Start the new year off right by optimizing Microsoft Teams and create a better cloud experience for your organization. Contact us today for a complimentary assessment.

 

 

Emerge Strong from COVID-19: How to Create Effective Teams

Emerge Strong from COVID-19: How to Create Effective Teams

When we turned the corner into 2020, did you have any idea that within 90 days, you’d be operating with a large part of your team (if not all of them) working from home?

And now that this is the New Normal, how are you faring?

Does your organization feel secure? How is data being stored and shared?

What about project assets? Do you have documented trails of conversations?

Are all the right players involved in the right meetings? And if you’re video conferencing, are those channels secure?

There are so many critical questions to find solutions for, because the coronavirus climate is going to be around for a while.

 

The Good News

If the Microsoft Office 365 suite is part of your operating system, there is really great news. In addition to the standard Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint tools, you also have access to Microsoft Teams.

Teams is the perfect platform for your agile workforce – this cloud-based technology enables groups within your enterprise to collaborate, communicate, and memorialize all aspects of their project(s) in one secure place. 

Teams is Microsoft Powered – The source on which you rely for credibility, security, innovation, and data-driven excellence.

Teams has seen significant growth over the last year, with Microsoft announcing the app had exploded in popularity from 20 million business users in November to 44 million in April. Part of that bump, about 12 million users, joined the service between March 11 and March 18 as more people around the world began working from home due to coronavirus lockdowns. (Yahoo Finance, 3/30/2020)

Microsoft Teams video conference

Video conference within Microsoft Teams

 

Want Teams now? Prone 2 Dream Technologies has been a Microsoft partner since 2006. We can have you up and running this platform fast and will provide training for seamless integration. Contact Us.

  

What exactly is Teams?

Teams is a hub for teamwork.

Pull together different teams for different ideas. Then create the teams for the projects that will transform those ideas into realities.

Your teams work together in the cloud, communicating by chat instead of email and using channels for all relevant files and folders.

It’s a workspace for editing documents simultaneously, with single tap replies, likes, and mentions.

A team can customize their project with websites, notes, and apps.

The result – Teams is fun – and having fun inspires creativity, productivity, and a winning team culture.

 

12 Benefits of Using Teams

  1. Video and audio conferencing and recording. There are other platforms that provide these services, but wouldn’t you rather hold these meetings within your own secure environment?
  2. Fully secured business platform with private hosting (and HIPAA compliant for Healthcare companies). Teams enables you to transition to a cloud-based infrastructure, lowering the total cost of ownership of your IT and management solutions.
  3. Quarterly compliance documentation. Easily store, submit, review critical reports.
  4. Virtually brings people around ideas. The ability to assemble the right people to brainstorm, document, collaborate and plan, no matter where they’re located.
  5. Memorialization of instant messages. Chat individually or within a specific group, saving ideas and comments.
  6. Inline conversations and dedicated group email. Each project communication goes to the right people and is saved in the right spot.
  7. Simultaneous document authoring and version control. An easy way to collaborate on written communications.
  8. Enables unlimited projects ongoing within your environment. And all project assets are securely stored within this workspace.
  9. Ability to include external contributors. Need to invite a client, vendor, potential hire to a meeting within your secure workspace? No problem.
  10. Reduces costly travel expenses. So much work can be achieved in Teams, you’ll find less traveling is needed.
  11. Lowers your total cost of IT ownership through its virtual, cloud-based platform. Teams integrates with most popular business apps.
  12. Simple set-up and easy for your team to learn.

 

You can’t afford to wait

You may be wondering “How can I possibly implement a new system or process right now? I have so much on my plate!” But you can’t afford to wait if you know or even suspect that important business assets are slipping through the cracks.

Get set up now on Teams and emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic with a future-focused, location-neutral platform for your business infrastructure.

Prone 2 Dream Technologies is your bridge to Microsoft Teams. Prone 2 Dream has been a Microsoft partner since 2006, providing secure enterprise solutions to the healthcare and hospitality industries.

We would welcome the opportunity to show you how Teams creates a hub for teamwork, enabling your remote and on-site workforce to stay connected and engaged. P2D can set you up quickly and virtually train your team.

Contact us today for a demonstration.

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