Microsoft Teams

At BITS we specialise in helping businesses adopt the latest cloud-based technologies like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams for Small Business

In 2016, Microsoft added a new tool to its Office 365 suite of services – called Microsoft Teams. Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that provides global, remote, and dispersed teams with the ability to work together and share information via a common platform. Users can use cool features like document collaboration, one-on-one chat, team chat, video calls, and more. Microsoft Teams is also fully integrated with many other Office 365 services such as SharePoint, Exchange, and Yammer.

Although it has been in existence since 2016, it experienced an explosion of growth when the coronavirus pandemic hit, and businesses were hurriedly looking for remote working solutions. On the 19^th of March 2020, Microsoft reported Teams had seen growth of approximately 12 million daily users in that past week. The platform now has more than 44 million daily users who generate more than 900 million meetings and calling minutes per day. This is unbelievable growth and for the most part, Teams was able to handle the pressure (although there were a couple of outages as the numbers surged during the early stages of the pandemic).

Microsoft has been constantly improving what Teams has to offer and as businesses are changing the way they work in response to the covid-19 pandemic. The one point that nearly everyone will agree on is that businesses will have to transform how we work together in a remote way. Teams really is an ideal choice in this space and especially so for those businesses who are used to using Microsoft products already.

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app that helps your team stay organized and have conversations—all in one place. The main items within Teams are:

Teams – Find channels to belong to or create your own. Within “channels” you can hold on-the-spot meetings, have conversations, and share files.

Meetings – See everything you have planned up for the day or week. Or, you can schedule a meeting. This calendar syncs with your Outlook calendar.

Calls – In some cases, if your organization has it set up (as we do in BITS) you can call anyone from Teams, even if they are not using Teams. Basically, Teams can take over from your traditional phone system.

Activity – Catch up on all your unread messages, @mentions, replies, and more.

Microsoft Teams

Contact us today to discuss how we can help you migrate to Microsoft 365 and Teams and make the most of the features that are available to you.

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Teams also offers a lot of additional plug-in apps for your use (for example the “Polly” app or plug-in for polling co-workers). All of which are geared to increase collaboration and making it easier to communicate and stay in touch with your colleagues, especially when remote working.

At BITS we specialise in helping businesses adopt the latest cloud-based technologies like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.

We have been using Teams for a while now and when the pandemic hit we also implemented the Teams Voice calling element so that our team could quickly and efficiently work from home but still be able to pick up incoming calls, make outgoing calls, transfer calls, etc. Basically, a fully hosted phone system within an app that we had already been using. We have a lot of knowledge in Microsoft Teams and are well positioned to work with you to implement it into your business.