Microsoft Teams Support For Business Users

Why Use Teams?

If your business uses Microsoft 365, you have staff working from home or across various sites and your people often work on projects together, welcome to the collaboration tool that could take your ability to work together to a different level.

Teams was built by Microsoft to help groups of people chat, share and work on files together, making team calls and video conferences easy. And for those who already use Microsoft 365, it doesn’t cost a penny more!

There are nearly 145 million users of Teams (as of April 2021) across the globe overcoming team challenges just like yours. Here are some that may sound familiar to you:

I need to contact my colleague in the office or another site, but I wait too long for an email response.

The Teams chat facility makes it so much easier to work with a colleague without resorting to email or phone. If the chat needs to be private, the text facility keeps it that way. The beauty is every message is stored so you can scroll back through your chats and check exactly what you agreed or advised.

Chat really does take productivity to a new level, reduces emails, improves working relationships and speeds up issue resolution and project completion. It could be the key to unlocking your teams’ ability to collaborate and get the results you want for your customers.

I often work on Word documents or Excel spreadsheets with my colleagues which can be a frustrating experience.

Without the flexibility of 365 it can be very annoying when you want to add something to your group spreadsheet but another user is working on it. And how many times have you had to ask a colleague to exit a document because they’ve left it open, even though they are not working on it?

Teams integrated into Microsoft 365 is the perfect solution. Teams makes it easy for two or more people to work on the same document at the same time in different locations. No more need to email your version to your colleagues. Now a link can be shared on Teams, everyone can contribute and finish a document together, the whole process accelerated and made easier. Screen sharing, chat and video calls mean you don’t all have to be in the same room to get a key piece of work completed. And when you’re happy with the finished job, everything is continually sync’d to the cloud in a secure environment. It really does take collaboration and productivity to a new level.

We’ve been using Zoom for team calls but screensharing can be challenging.

If you’re working on a project and you all join a team call, you do not want to worry about who can and cannot share their screen. If meetings are going to work well and keep everyone engaged, the functionality of the platform needs to work. That’s why Teams is such a good solution.

Assuming your company policies and procedures allow it (some users prefer to prevent sharing files with external participants for example), anyone can screenshare during the meeting and share files while online. If somebody remembers that information is available in a file stored in the group channel, it can be accessed immediately and put on screen. It makes a collaborative meeting flow.

Every meeting can be recorded and shared with the participants. And Microsoft keeps everything encrypted so if you want to invite a guest from outside the organisation, they can join your meeting but they cannot access your files or recordings. You can however, choose to share these things with your external contacts if you’re comfortable with their credentials.

Teams is designed to make business teams work more effectively. The video conferencing function does just that for you and your colleagues.

I wish I had one single solution that allowed me to work on everything I need on my desktop and lets me make a call from my PC when I want to.

Teams is used by so many clients now to directly call contacts who also use the Teams system. It’s a key benefit of the platform. In addition, Microsoft 365 now includes the necessary APIs to phone external contacts too. Microsoft offers Direct Routing into Teams which means you can hold a full contact base and dial any of them when you need to, without ever leaving your screen! A chat, videoconferencing, collaboration and phone platform all in one!

How can Cloud9 Business Services help your business?

If the issues we described above sound familiar to you, why not look at how Microsoft Teams could work for your business? Cloud9 Business Services aims to help you get the very best results. So how do we deliver these results?