Bringing Your Team Together

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”

– Henry Ford

Unless you are a sole proprietor you have a team of people working with you to achieve a common goal. The two most important concepts on any team are sharing of ideas (communication) and splitting the workload (collaboration). It’s hard enough to communicate and collaborate when your whole team is in the same physical office, but it’s ten times harder to do this when the team is dispersed.

Enter Microsoft Teams – the ultimate “Swiss Army Knife” of electronic teamwork. Microsoft Teams allows your whole team to collaborate through chat, voice and video calls, shared tasks, files and live online file editing sessions. And if that’s not enough for you, then you can pick from many third-party applications that integrate into Microsoft Teams (yes, Zoom is one of them).

Microsoft Teams breaks all communication into channels and sub-channels, thus it’s much easier to focus on a particular task. All communication that pertains to that channel can be easily searched without sifting through a myriad of email messages or shared documents. It’s also easy to find items that specifically mention a team member by name when @-mentions are used in posts. Speaking of searching, Microsoft Teams uses the advanced Microsoft Azure infrastructure, so you can even search recorded video meetings for a specific word or phrase. Using the Azure translation functionality, you can perform searches even if the meeting was in a different language!

If you are a Microsoft Office 365 subscriber, then Microsoft Teams is already part of your subscription. Teams is available for Windows, Mac, iPhones, iPads, Android based phones and tablets and even Linux devices. For a simple deployment, all you have to do is install the Microsoft Teams application on your computer or device, create a channel and invite your teammates. For a more complicated deployment, I highly recommend that you obtain the services of an expert to help you create a solid structure that you can build upon.

Charles Darwin once said, “It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” So, tell every member of your team to install Microsoft Teams and let the collaboration begin!

Feel free to call contact us at (800) CDML-123 [800-2365-123] or [email protected] if you need help implementing Microsoft Teams in your organization. Len Kaplan is a long-time Certified Microsoft Professional and CDML Computer Services is a Microsoft Silver Partner.