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.

But how can Microsoft Teams make the most of your employees’ time and increase your organization’s productivity?

Attracting and Keeping Better Employees

A strong digital culture is paramount to attracting new employees. Having the freedom to work remotely without losing effectiveness makes your business an attractive workplace. Whether they are looking to work from home or on the go, Microsoft Teams allow for the kind of digital work environment that attracts the best of the best. A remote work solution that allows for instant, secure idea-sharing also makes location less of a hurdle for potential new employees. It also improves the morale of current employees as well as reduce turnover rates.

Keeping Everything in One Place

Microsoft Teams has everything your team needs for successful remote collaborations in one place. Meetings, chats, files, calls, and tools, all in one convenient package will revolutionize your company’s digital workplace. Keeping everything your team needs in one single and secure location, Microsoft Teams is simply an essential tool for productivity.

Bettering Day-to-day Productivity

Microsoft Teams makes it possible to keep conversations going in real-time regardless of where employees are located. Microsoft Teams can be accessed on mobile devices as well as PCs and laptops, making it possible to keep a conversation going while traveling and to continue without hitch in a new location.

It is easy for all team members to review drawings or emails, share files, and to use chat and video calls. Seamlessly integrated with Office 365, Microsoft Teams is a fully functional system for any workplace that wants to go digital.

Easier Collaborations

Giving your employees the tools to work together digitally automatically results in higher productivity, more mobility, and better communication between teams. It is also easier to keep all your team members up to date on your organization and industry.

Ready to increase your team’s productivity? Contact 6th Street Consulting for a free virtual consultation!

The post Transforming Organizational Productivity with Microsoft Teams appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Preview Meeting and Call Experiences on Desktops

Now when you join a Teams call or meeting by using the desktop app, it will open in a secondary window.  That way you can navigate around Teams without losing track of where your meetings or call is located on screen.

More Control Within Teams Meetings

Hosting a meeting, but need a few more moments to get ready?  Now you can have the option of making everyone wait in a meeting lobby when joining a meeting that you have organized.  To access this setting open the Meeting options and then select Only me in the Who can bypass the lobby? field.

(Updated 7/17/20)

Search within a chat or channel

Search makes our lives easier and not you can search within specific channels or even chats.  Just like with typical Microsoft applications Ctrl+F (of Cmd+f on Macs) will bring up a search bar to search for whatever you need.  Works great in any chat, one-on-one or group chat rooms.

Cortana Voice Assistance coming to Teams

While Cortana doesn’t have the most forward-facing role with Windows 10, the digital assistant is coming to Teams mobile app.  In the coming weeks, expect to see Cortana’s voice functionality helping users to schedule and join meetings, send chat requests, share files and more.

(Updated 6/28/20)

Improvements with Safari

No longer will you need to use the dial-in audio conferencing options when using the Safari browsers to operate Teams.  Your device’s built-in speakers and microphone will be available for speaking and listening to the other meeting attendees.

Apps in Chat

App and chatbot functionality has come to private and group chats within Teams.  You can now update apps to be used in the various chat types.

Microsoft Teams introduces some important updates for the Summer of 2020. As everyone works toward the new normal, there’s new territory to conquer in the world of virtual meetings. There are several updates to Microsoft Teams. Here, we will cover just a few of them.

A Larger Group Chat

Those chats are expanding! With the new update, you can include 250 people on the group chat.

Phone Privacy

This update hides the phone number for people dialing into the meeting. The phone number will still show for people who are within your organization.

This update provides important privacy protection for people who may be a guest or who is calling in from another organization.

Teams Now Have Meeting Options

There is a new button in Teams. It is labeled “Meeting Options.” This button appears after you have sent your meeting invite. Click on it to alter the settings for your meeting.

Use it to change things like who can present or the lobby bypass.

Bookings

You can now book online meetings and in-person appointments using Teams. Use Teams to stay organized and on-time for education appointments, doctor’s visits, and more.

You can book only meetings with Microsoft Teams as far as virtual meetings.

This new feature allows designated schedulers to manage the schedules for entire departments as well as their staff.

A New Way to Manage

As remote work becomes more commonplace and people use more video in their workplace, it is important to try to centralize communication.

These updates make a central calendar that includes all virtual communication, in-person appointments, and chats. Keeping things together has just become more manageable.

Larger Groups

There are several updates relating to meeting and group size. The inclusion of up to 250 people per chat is a big game-changer for large companies.

In the past, people using chats had to keep several chats going at once to manage large discussions. As people try to clarify details between groups, the chats could easily multiply. Multiple sub-chats emerged. The larger number of people per chat will help with this sprawl.

250 is easily the largest chat group size manageable for most people. With more people than that, threads become too much to keep track of.

Intuition and Ease of Use

These updates are small yet powerful additions to the capability of Microsoft Teams. Like the updates that usually come from Microsoft, everything is easy to work with and does not require too much thought.

This intuitive design and framework combined with the adjustments in numbers of participants should make it easier for larger companies to adopt Microsoft Teams.

Larger teams are a largely untapped market for this software, which started out with capabilities for smaller offices. There are potentially more updates to come regarding large businesses.

A More Powerful Software

These updates are helping Microsoft Teams pack a lot of power. This software does an amazing amount with a relatively simple dashboard. The question is really how complex people’s meeting schedules are.

There is a lot going on with meetings that take place online. Be sure to check back for more updates as this software develops more features.

The post What’s New with Microsoft Teams (Summer 2020) appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Teams came after Slack, but it has a strong competitive edge via integration. This software allows for full integration of Microsoft Office. It also integrates with other apps, and new app capability is being added all the time.

People can easily receive notifications from Microsoft Teams even if it’s not their software of choice. This makes it a strong candidate for large and diverse virtual teams with many different personalities.

Microsoft Teams is a large program. It keeps all of the interfaces from Microsoft, including Office, in one spot. If you are ready to combat the piecemeal nature of working virtually, Microsoft Teams should be on your purchase list.

Master Notifications and the Activity Feed

The first thing you need to do is realize that people get tons of notifications every day. You’ll realize just how many you get once they’re all in one place. Don’t get overwhelmed!

Learn to use the notifications and the activity feed.

Set good boundaries with your notifications settings. Just like with any notification feed, you shouldn’t try to follow every last detail of your contacts’ behavior. Work with what you can work with.

Use the different notification settings, and turn off different teams you don’t need to hear from right then.

As with most Microsoft products, there is a lot of user-friendly capability with these features.

Learn Teams Commands

There is a good-sized list of commands that will make your day go faster. They are intuitive and easy to learn. Use them just like you would any shortcut command for programming or accessing a computer.

The commands are the fastest way to set your status (such as Do Not Disturb or Be Right Back) and call people.

Focus Mentions

Mentions are a great tool for communicating with lots of people. As with all interfaces, it takes some discipline not to overuse personal mentions and channels.

The mentions are intuitive. Use the @ sign followed by someone’s name to mention them directly.

Use tags to mention people in a group by their tag name. For example, if you are managing a team of writers, you can get everyone a notification by categorizing various names under the team “writers” and then using “@writers” to send them a notification.

Make Great Video Calls

Video calls are a whole different idea than in-person meetings. It’s too easy to have a clamoring meeting of voices. People have to practice good video etiquette, but what really helps is appointing a chairperson for the meeting.

The chairperson should give clear direction. They can utilize non-distracting background effects and direct people to use the mute button where appropriate.

It will take some practice to form strong teams that listen to each other on video calls. Start off on the right foot by clearly outlining rules for everyone. Appoint a chairperson right off the bat.

It is easy to share meetings with people who couldn’t attend on Stream.

All in One Spot

Microsoft Teams is the software for people who need to take control of their desktop. It does take a little bit to learn, but the truth is that you are probably spending that amount of energy jumping from app to app anyway.  Dive right in and experience the difference when you manage everything from one interface.

The post Become An Effective Microsoft Teams User appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

In the past, Zoom has been an incredibly popular product for holding these meetings. Microsoft Teams has long offered a viable alternative to Zoom, with significantly better security measures that result in a Tier-D security compliance rating. This compliance rating makes Microsoft Teams usable for even the strictest government sector meetings. Meanwhile, Zoom has come under fire during the Coronavirus outbreak for weak security measures. Some of these Zoom breaches have come to be referred to as “Zoombombing”, but they are no laughing matter.

Microsoft Teams Features Compared to Zoom

Microsoft Teams offers several important security features that Zoom does not. Besides having a greater emphasis on the security features of its products, Microsoft has greater bandwidth to deal with providing quality service.

Microsoft is a more mature company and deletes user data after accounts are removed. The company works hard on creating transparency reports, which Zoom is still working on creating for its users.

It’s important to note that several government agencies have banned using Zoom for their business, given the recent security breaches and the lack of cooperation with law enforcement on the part of the company.

Microsoft offers a detailed report on the security measures they take, including how their protocols for data transfer are stored and what they do with data. As an added benefit, Microsoft Teams does not utilize ads in their product.

Microsoft Teams For Government Agencies and Defense Contractors

We are sure that government agencies like defense contractors and schools are getting a better product with Microsoft Teams. Given the recent choice of other government contractors to stop using Zoom, we offer Microsoft Teams as a superior option.

You have a lot more control over how you manage security in Microsoft Teams, and we are happy to offer demos at our company. Microsoft is a much older company and has a stronger culture in security than other newer products, like Zoom, can offer.

We encourage you to try it for yourself, but we also encourage you to review Microsoft’s detailed outline of the transfer protocols for Teams. This report offers insight into how the security ratings are achieved and why Microsoft Teams is HIPPA-compliant.

The post Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom Meetings in the Era of Coronavirus appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Integrated Outlook Experience

Teams are where work gets done.  And today, a lot of work and time goes into email communication.  Teams set out to make your email work harder and improve the way that employees communicate and collaborate with each other.  By integrating Outlook and Teams, you can now move a Teams conversation from Teams to Outlook with just a few simple clicks.  Additionally, you can take an email conversation and move it to Teams (including images, tables, and attachments).  Learn more about this new feature.

Targeted Communication

Teams is smart.  When it comes to communication, Teams can help you to define the audience that you need to message automatically.  By using an @tag, Teams allows a user to message an entire audience associated with that @tag with just one click.  Need to message the entire marketing department about a new product, use their @tag (for example @marketing), and in one-click, your message is ready to send to the whole group.

Files Powered by SharePoint

Never lose track of a file again.  With the new Teams file experience powered by SharePoint, the File tab of a channel includes the ability to sync files directly from your PC.  Now you can see previews of file types including images, videos, Microsoft 365 files like Word & Excel, and much more directly within Teams.

Stay tuned to the 6th Street Consulting blog for more updates on the latest functionality coming to Microsoft Teams, and contact us if your company or organization is looking to customize or optimize their Teams experience.

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