Team connectivity software has become more important than ever. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, the number of remote workers was growing steadily. Many companies in Fresno and the rest of the country had already begun programs where employees work from home either part or full-time.
Now, most employees are working remotely all the time while social distancing measures are in place, and they need the right tools to stay connected.
During our IT consulting sessions, we often hear of a need for an “all-in-one” solution for team communications, and one of the best out there is Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams combines several features in one software, including:
- Organized team chat
- VoIP voice calls
- Video calls
- Live event streaming
- File sharing
- Office 365 integration
- 3rd party program integration
Many companies that don’t use Office 365 overlook Teams as a solution because they think you have to have an Office 365 business subscription to use it.
But did you know there is a FREE version of MS Teams? No subscription required!
Ways You Can Improve Efficiency & Lower Costs with Teams
There are approximately 13 million daily users on Microsoft Teams. The reason so many businesses use it is because it can take the place of several software tools.
We’ll go through the key features below that can keep your team connected to each other and your customers when they’re working from different locations.
Ditch the PBX and VoIP Phone System
Did you know that Teams has a calling feature? You can replace a costly PBX system or VoIP and use integrated calling with MS Teams for greater efficiency.
Their audio calling feature keeps all your communications in one place and organized.
For example, you can set up chat channels in Teams for departments, projects, clients, or any other designation. When you have calls to make related to that particular topic, call right from the channel and the call history will stay organized within that channel topic.
This saves time and is much more efficient because it keeps all communications (phone, chat, files) in the same place.
Cancel Those Video Conference & Webinar Subscriptions
Are you subscribing to a video conference platform like Zoom and a webinar platform to host live customer events?
Microsoft Teams can replace both of those, reducing the number of cloud subscriptions that you have to pay for each month.
With the free version of Teams, you can host group video calls for up to 50 people.
With Office 365 Business Essentials ($5/user/month) or Office 365 Business Premium ($12.50/user/month), you can host group video calls for up to 250 people and live web events for up to 10,000 people.
Replace Your File Storage/Sharing App
Looking for some free cloud storage? Microsoft Teams offers that too, allowing you to replace yet another cloud subscription.
The free version of Teams gives users 10 GB of team file storage and 2GB each of personal storage for each user.
The paid versions offer 1 TB of personal file storage through OneDrive.
Keep Chats and Everything Else Together
You won’t need a separate team chat program when you use Teams. It can replace programs like Slack, in addition to all its other features.
Users can use secure chat channels to interact with their department or team. These channels have features such as:
- @mentions
- Alert preferences
- File sharing
- Voice/video call from within the channel
- Gifs and stickers to express yourself
- Ability to invite guest users to a dedicated channel (clients/vendors, etc.)
Keep Work Organized
Microsoft Teams doesn’t just keep your company conversations organized it also gives employees a way to organize their workflow.
They can launch apps, MS Office programs, files, PDFs, webpages and more from a single dashboard. All they need to do is add a “tab” for their workflows and add shortcuts there to the items they use regularly. Then instead of needing to open all those items separately, they can access them all from Teams.
Web Versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
The free version of Microsoft Teams comes with the web version of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. So, if you’re on a tight budget, you’ll have some excellent online productivity tools you can use.
Teams is fully integrated with both the web and desktop versions of the Office applications, making it easy to do things like co-author documents fluidly from within the Teams interface.
Find Your Messages Quickly… Finally!
How much time do you and your team spend looking for an email, text, or message? Information flies around so fast that it can take forever to find a message from two weeks ago that has vital information.
The Teams platform has a powerful keyword search feature that allows you to quickly pull up any conversations containing your keyword(s). This improves efficiency and reduces the time wasted looking for information.
Get Set Up with Microsoft Teams Today!
Our Unity IT cloud exerts can get your organization set up with Teams so you can start enjoying all the cost saving features right away.
Contact us today to schedule your Teams consultation at 559-297-1007 or reach out online.