Online Collaboration Tools: Work with Microsoft Teams

You’ve seen the impact high-performing teams can have in business. But what if they could achieve even more? What if they had an environment that helped them be more creative, to share ideas instantly and easily across geographies and generations while staying in sync with each other? In a world where collaboration is how innovative work gets done, teams need workspaces and tools they are comfortable using. And it’s up to business leaders to make it easy for them to get both.

As a business leader, you need to make sure your organization provides collaboration tools that suit different personalities, skillsets, and needs.

So, what is the right technology solution for modern collaboration and teamwork? It must be flexible enough to meet all your teams’ communication needs, become a single hub for teamwork, be customizable, and stay secure. Microsoft Teams—the hub of teamwork within Office 365— can help your employees work together seamlessly.

Here’s what your Collaboration tools should empower you to do:

1. Communicate without effort
2. Be more productive through better integration
3. Customize features for every team
4. Work with confidence

Communicate without effort

Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365, makes it simple for teams to communicate in real time, make fast decisions, and share content in an open and transparent way. Teams cuts across organizational boundaries by allowing private chats, group chats, or team conversations that are visible to the entire team.

-Employees who use social messaging tools internally can see as much as a 35% reduction in time spent searching for company information. 2 2 “The Social Economy,” 2012, McKinsey Global Institute. –

Be more productive through better integration

Your teams need flexible tools to work with. When tools are integrated with the business applications they’re already using, work happens faster, enabling a frictionless communication and collaboration experience. Teams helps solve one of the biggest workplace challenges: time wasted as employees look for content, tools, contacts, and conversation threads.

Microsoft Teams uses powerful, integrated search capabilities and built-in access to SharePoint, OneNote and Planner, so team members can find what they’re looking for— instantly. Because every document shared in Microsoft Teams is saved to the cloud, team members work from the latest version—no searching.

With fewer passwords to remember and fewer blockers, your team can focus on what matters most: their work. And IT doesn’t have to worry about managing multiple services or shadow IT.

Customize features for every team

Your tools need to account for your teams’ unique needs with hubs that are customizable. Teams should be able to pull preferred tools into their hub and have multiple conversations and work threads, as well as pin important files for easy reference. Intelligent communications including automation, notification settings, and chatbots can provide additional support to ensure everyone has what they need. Giving employees the ability to customize their chatbots and teamwork hubs means they can receive alerts and notifications as they want. Integration with third-party apps means the work you used to set aside time to complete can come directly to you.

Work with confidence

Whether company-approved or not, workers will still use instant chat solutions, shared document spaces, and more—giving rise to shadow IT, management complexity, and security risks. Your IT managers are probably on the alert for tools that don’t hold the same security and compliance standards as the rest of your business applications, but some unauthorized tools might still slip through.

However, it is possible to provide secured solutions without putting an additional burden on your IT team. Microsoft Teams provides industry leading security and compliance capabilities, with data encryption for at-rest and in-transit data in company cloud storage and email. You benefit from the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise grade cloud: it’s the capabilities you’re used to, with security, privacy, and trust built directly into the service.

-Nearly 60 % of IT pros believe sensitive files/information should not be shared via group chat apps.  “Business Chat Apps in 2017: Top Players and Adoption Plans,” 2017, Spiceworks. –

What to look for in your teamwork tools:

Unified communication Business application integration Customization and scalability for teams Easy search for files, content, and people Automation Ease of use for employees and IT End-to-end security.

What are you waiting for? Microsoft Teams: all teams welcome!