Microsoft Office 365 has been the ubiquitous answer to office management for years now, and it comes with a wide variety of tools that all have their own advantages and uses. One of those is Teams, and that’s what we’re going to focus on today. In our years of experience, we’ve noticed that Teams as a tool is incredibly underutilized, and that many people are simply unaware of the number of features within it provides—and wind up paying money to access redundant services as a result.
What Does Teams Offer?
Microsoft Teams is primarily known as a collaborative messaging platform, where a company can split its employees up into the titular “Teams” with their own chat rooms and instant messaging components. This kind of remote-friendly, accessible-anywhere communications solution is both powerful and well understood at this time. However, Teams offers significantly more than that, which is the purpose of this article. If we’re going to remain in the communications aspect of Teams, a surprising number of organizations are unaware of Teams’ video conferencing and hosting features—features that allow anyone from inside or outside their organization to meet with the team. Nothing has highlighted the underutilized or underappreciated aspect of this feature more than the rapid rise of Zoom as a web conferencing tool; Teams can do everything Zoom can do and more, while also allowing for live events and it’s in-built features. Fully utilizing even this one facet of Teams would let businesses cut the cost of premium Zoom plans from their budget, saving them money.
Teams also supports collaborative workflow tools that are often underutilized—this is where the majority of the unused value lies. Teams supports file sharing and editing, as well as track-changes functionality, giving each delegated “Team” an easy way to edit and work on files from anywhere, which can let companies save money on solutions that offer similar things. It’s also worth mentioning that the Office 365 package comes with several tools that can integrate with, and support, this existing functionality. If you’re trying to find a file or conversation, Teams’ search function looks through Teams, Exchange, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive, all for the sake of easy workflow and convenience. One of the best parts of this is that every step of the process is encrypted and secure; all Office 365 services have security features that meet compliance standards like HIPAA.
One of the most unknown and underutilized aspects of Teams is the customizability of it. Teams supports hundreds of existing apps and services that you can integrate with, including Office apps. In addition to that, Teams can be supported by Microsoft Power Platform, allowing companies to build their own apps and plugins to tailor their workflow and tools to their unique needs. Teams is friendly to new code, and has an array of inbuilt slash commands to make certain processes quicker. It also comes with a set of two-dozen programmable bots to automate reports, polling, updates, and so on, all for the sake of making your collaborative space more efficient.
We hope we opened your eyes to some of the more underutilized parts of Microsoft Teams. We at Seltek have been working with and within Office 365 for years now, and we want our clients to use these tools to the fullest extent. If you’re interested in a trusted technology partner, Seltek would like to volunteer our effort and expertise; we will help you implement and best utilize the range of tools afforded to you, including (but not limited to) Microsoft Teams. Feel free to give us a call so we can get started!
