Microsoft Teams and Azure are not new tools to enterprise organizations but their usefulness in today’s world where remote working is more and more common cannot be underestimated.

Cloud-based to work anywhere, anytime

All office workers know the value of Microsoft Office products for creating and sharing documents, presentations, datasets, and more. They know Microsoft is THE option when you need a secure computing environment that is still flexible and user-friendly.

But the casual user may not realize exactly how Microsoft is changing the way modern enterprise organizations are doing business.

Power users of Microsoft 365 know exactly how useful this software is for enabling collaboration no matter where team members are based. The powerful combination of Office 365 and Windows 10 means that enterprise organizations that use Microsoft 365 can enable worker productivity no matter where team members are based.

When you add Microsoft Teams to the equation, you are able to take your team’s productivity to new heights. With security features that enterprise organizations need along with the file sharing and collaboration tools they want; Microsoft Teams allows for real-time collaboration that you may have thought could only be achieved with in-person meetings.

Reach new heights with Azure

Sometimes, though, the robust suite of Microsoft products does not meet the specific, unique needs of your organization. That is where Microsoft Azure comes in.

Microsoft Azure is not a set piece of software. It is an ever-expanding set of cloud-based computing services available to anyone who wants to run an enterprise on the internet without having to install and manage hardware or server software.

Migrating your servers, apps, and databases to Azure means that you can save money by not having to have or maintain hardware to enable cloud-based computing in your enterprise. The virtual nature of Azure also means no unexpected downtime and it is easy to scale up or down as needed.

Azure is the platform that modern enterprise organizations need to enhance their work and truly embrace cloud-computing for their workforce.

The post Building a Modern Enterprise Workplace with Microsoft Teams and Azure appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

“This is an incredible honor to receive from our peers and other professionals in our field”, said Michelle Hollis, President of 6^th Street Consulting.  “Our focus is always on the end-user, empowering our clients and their employees to achieve more and we plan to continue that approach in the decade to come”.

The IAMCP SoCal Partner of the Decade award honors the company in the Southern California area, including the LA North, SoCal, and San Diego chapters of IAMCP, that has proven to be an ongoing leader in the Microsoft partner community over the past ten years through their business expertise, community leadership, and service to the IAMCP SoCal.

6th Street Consulting’s successful partnerships with businesses of all sizes implementing Microsoft-based solutions to challenges and their innovative business before technology mindset have made them invaluable to the community of Microsoft partners. This honor recognizes their track record of stellar customer service and industry leadership, both locally and nationwide.

“6th Street Consulting has been a trusted partner of mine for many years, across multiple companies. The 6SC team is very easy to work with, hardworking and resourceful. They have excellent domain knowledge and expertise across the Microsoft platform; coupled with their business acumen and willingness to go the extra mile for their customers, I know I can always count on 6SC,” said long-time customer Henry Ong of Quest Software

The award was given during the IAMCP SoCal Tenth Anniversary party which brought together Microsoft partners from across the country including Microsoft executives, field sellers, and OCP team members. The day-long event was full of opportunities for education for Microsoft partners, feedback for Microsoft, a focus on diversity and inclusion, and a fundraising drive that raised over $100,000 for the Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Ronald McDonald House.

This is not the only Microsoft Partner award received by 6th Street Consulting. Their passion for what they do, and the results they achieve for their clients, has resulted in numerous industry honors for the firm, including:

• Top one percent of Microsoft’s SharePoint partner ecosystem
• Among RCP’s Top 200 Microsoft Solution Providers of 2017
• Microsoft Partner of the Year for Collaboration & Content in 2013
• Microsoft Managed Partner with both a Gold competency in Collaboration & Content and a Silver competency in Cloud Productivity.

Based out of Redondo Beach, California, 6^th Street Consulting is a Microsoft Gold Partner and is trusted by global businesses to deliver intranets, portals, and experiences that truly engage.  For more information about the company please visit www.CulverG.com or email at info@CulverG.com.

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There are numerous benefits of Microsoft Teams and how they can help your business.  From boosted efficiency to improved collaboration and communication, Microsoft Teams empowers businesses to thrive.

Talking with staff around our office, we compiled a list of our favorite aspects of Microsoft Teams to provide you with no-nonsense benefits and ways it can help you too:

Agility

Teams is a tool with purpose and incorporate conversations from both email and chat and improve the quality of these conversations to cut down on the number of emails and chats necessary.  Additionally, logging all the communication in one place being able to circle back and view conversations and files cuts down on wasted time and eliminates unnecessary conversations.

Customization

Microsoft Teams is extremely flexible and can be customized to meet the needs of any user.  The software promotes connectedness among staff and can be displayed using the branding of a business for unique personalization.

Collaboration

Collaboration is more than a buzzword; it is the new way of doing business.  Rarely are decisions made solely by one individual, so having the ability to quickly come together and collaborate increases the likelihood of decisions being made together and more quickly than ever before.

If your company is still deciding on whether to adopt Microsoft Teams, take it from us and get started.  Not only will it provide improvements in communication, but it quickly will become your go-to business tool providing sleek and easy communication and transparency of information.

Download our free Microsoft Teams Whitepaper to better understand the platform and how 6^th Street Consulting’s talented group of developers and architects can help you maximize the resources of your first-line staff.

The post Real World Advice for Incorporating Microsoft Teams into Your Business appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

According to Forrester Research, the amount of time Microsoft Teams saves businesses has a direct correlation to how much money Microsoft Teams saves businesses.

First, let’s look at time.

• Workers save 4 hours/week because of Microsoft Teams’ improved collaboration and information sharing platform.
• Employees sit in meetings 18.9 percent less of the time because of Microsoft Teams.
• Microsoft teams replaced 150 trips with just-as-successful online meetings.
• Decision makers made choices 17.7 percent more quickly with the help of Microsoft Teams.

Here’s how that translates into money saved

Based on a study of businesses over three years – Forrester found a $30.3 million impact.

Companies saved:

• $6.9 million being more effective in meetings.
• $451,300 making faster decisions
• $4.8 million not having to consistently switch and cater to different applications with remote workers

“Teams is a cohesive environment where a user has access to everything in one place,” GM, telecoms.

The post Microsoft Teams … and Money appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

The study examined more than 260 businesses that use teams across a wide range of industries. These companies wanted to use teams increase employee productivity, improve collaboration across the organization and enable innovation. T

These same companies cited their challenge as the following: supporting global growth across multiple time zones, mobile connectivity, enhancing integration while keeping systems secure and keeping up innovation speed with the growing marketplace.

How Teams helped, per the study: reducing collaboration costs, accelerating decision making, improving both employee and customer experience.

The study breaks down how exactly Teams managed to do so.

With Teams’ seamless collaboration platform, workers saved 4 hours/week through seamless communication.

Online meetings took the place of 150 overnight trips.

Firstline workers saved 45 minutes per week by using Teams platforms to communicate with colleagues.

Time-to-decision making improved by 17.7 percent.

Companies held 18.9 percent less time in meetings.

The post Why Microsoft Teams Works – by the numbers appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Hub sites and communication sites offer rich experiences across your intranet. As business goals and team structures evolve, so too must your sites and the content that lives within them. We continue to add functionality to make it easier to create and configure any sites intent and outcome that you need throughout your intranet.

• Add rich colors to the hub site header – you will now have choices beyond the color white. It’ll be easier and more flexible to adhere to your preferred company theme and brand colors across more aspects of the sites and pages.
• Approvals for hub site association – a flexible approval process further empowers hub site owners and site owners to make requests and programmatically adapt to changes within their growing, dynamic intranet.
• Site scripting during hub site association – once a site gets associated to a hub site, it not only inherits the theme of the hub site, it can now be further configured using powerful site scripting methods to enforce permissions, shared metadata, preferred content management, brand elements and policies.

Program site scripts to run automatically when a site is associated to a hub site to adhere to preferences for that family of sites.

• Communication sites on-premises in SharePoint Server 2019 – like the benefits of “going modern” on-premises with team sites, SharePoint communication sites can be created and configured within SharePoint Server 2019.

New and updated web parts. Sites pull in content from across Office 365. To do this dynamically, and with flexibility, SharePoint news articles and pages use powerful, data-rich web parts, which you can configure to your needs as you design the look, feel and content of the information you share.

• Weather – allow authors to configure showing the web part to show weather information provided by MSN Weather for a given location.

You can now add the weather of any city to a page, and text overlay for images on your pages and news.

• Image web part: text on image – enhance your images with hyperlinks and allow authors to overlay text on images.
• Document library and lists web parts updates – It’s even easier to engage with documents and lists on a modern page with tile view and drag and drop upload. Now with custom views, grouping, sorting, filtering, column formatting, and drag & drop upload.
• Stream updates – no matter where you view a news article or page, you can expect that videos playing from Stream will look and playback beautifully – even when you are viewing them within the SharePoint mobile app. There, too, are channel improvements to help view and playback a complete set of videos in the context of your site or news article.
• Yammer updates – when you add a Yammer web part to a site home page or a news article, you can better able the preferred scoping of the groups that can be scoped to that site. We’ve also updated the interface to enhance how people can engage in the discussion – with richer feed with interactions like liking, @mentioning, adding content, and more.

We encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create the sites they need. Once established, associate them to hub sites to organize related sites and projects. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing dynamic, data-rich news articles.

The post The Evolution of SharePoint Hub Sites and Communication Sites appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

At work, it is important for every team member to streamline efforts and stay on the same page. Connected SharePoint team sites provide a central location to manage team files, input and connect to important data, and share timely news. And with insight into what drives the most engagement and value, people can course correct and optimize for greatest impact.

This week, for teamwork powered by SharePoint team sites, Microsoft has announced:

All the important SharePoint capabilities surface within Microsoft Teams. Team members can highlight SharePoint files, lists, pages, news, and more – right inside of the Microsoft Teams user experience. Soon they can:

• Access the full-power of SharePoint document library files experience inside Microsoft Teams. We are bringing the full power of the SharePoint document library experience to Microsoft Teams. Work together on files with previews, pinned items, metadata, Flows and more – powerful, consistent capabilities no matter where you work with your files. This new experience with files will accrue to your Outlook Online experience, too!

Get the full power of a SharePoint library when you work with your files in Microsoft Teams

• Connect a SharePoint team site to a Microsoft Teams team in one click. If you’re group-connected team site is not connected to a chat-based hub for teamwork, then it’s just one click of the new Connect to Teams button in bottom-left corner of your site that gets you one.
• See that a Teams channel is associated to a folder within the SharePoint library. Now it’s easy to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel & chat associated to it – right from within the SharePoint user interface.
• More easily pick news articles and lists when adding a SharePoint tab to a Teams’ channel. When you add a tab in Teams, you can tab between available lists, pages and news items to quickly bring them into your hub for teamwork. They’re your tabs, use them.

Group-connected SharePoint team site updates.When you share and work together, you need the tools and digital workspaces to communicate, access data, and stay productive. With employer expectations changing, employees are expected to be creative and to think critically. To further support this, we’re introducing:

• New Microsoft Planner integrations. This is Planner for the team as a full-page app. Simply click New > Plan, and start managing team tasks right inside the SharePoint user experience.

Add a Planner Plan from within SharePoint in Office 365 (click New > Plan)

• Group inbox activity visible within site activities. Beyond important site activities, like files modifications and published news, now you will see additional important email activity that’s happening in the group inbox.
• Modern team sites available on-premises within SharePoint Server 2019. Get the benefits of “going modern” on-premises. Team sites in SharePoint Server 2019 will have modern home pages (which give access to modern web parts and pages), modern lists and libraries, and will reflow and look beautiful inside the SharePoint mobile apps. Note: these sites are not “group-connected” as that requires the use of Office 365 groups only available in Office 365.

SharePoint is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams in Office 365. Use SharePoint team sites to manage content and share it with your team members via their hub for teamwork – Microsoft Teams. Create a group-connected site today, and start sharing.

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