In the last 3 years, Microsoft Teams has had a boom in popularity, partly due to its usefulness during the peaks of the Covid-19 pandemic – where many businesses worldwide were forced, by circumstance, to work remotely. But apart from Covid-19, more and more businesses have been realising the many benefits of Teams as a platform for communication, collaboration, and generally productivity.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams serves primarily as a communication platform – unifying instant messaging, videoconferencing, and internet telephony; but it is also commonly referred to specifically as a collaboration platform.
As part of the Microsoft 365 suite of products and services, Teams plays a very central role in the stack; it integrates with a number of the other apps and services to make certain workflows more efficient. We discussed this with businesses that have been using the products for years. One of the companies, TechQuarters, said that they rely on it when providing the managed IT services London based companies receive from them – as a communications solutions, it is ideal for keeping connected with clients and partners. But it’s primary benefit for businesses is its ability to streamline the way a business works, and improve productivity – so, how exactly does it do that?
Teams + the Rest of Microsoft 365
For businesses whose digital work infrastructure is based on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams will invariably act as the lynchpin, with which individuals can execute many different processes and workflows. When we asked TechQuarters, they confirmed that much of the work of their staff can be completed entirely within Teams, as it supports the creation, sharing, and editing of different file types, and is great for flexible communication.
Below are some examples of the different ways in which Teams overlaps with other apps and services to make tasks and processes easier for individuals.
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Outlook
The first product to look at is Outlook – Microsoft’s email client. Teams and Outlook are actually closely integrated, particularly through their respective calendars. All scheduled Teams meetings automatically show up on your Outlook calendar, and events that were created on your Outlook calendar are reflected in Teams.
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OneDrive
As most people who use Microsoft will know, OneDrive is a personal cloud storage service included in the M365 license. As Teams is fully integrated with the Microsoft Cloud, it means it is connected with OneDrive, so users will be able to access their OneDrive within the Teams app; and they will be able to save attachments from Teams directly to OneDrive.
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SharePoint
Just like OneDrive, an organisation’s SharePoint environments can be connected to Teams. This allows individuals to access specific sites that they have access to. As well as this, when a team is created in the app, a new SharePoint site will be created specifically for that team.
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Word
Teams and Word are well-integrated, which enables users to work on documents and other word files directly in the platform. Given that both OneDrive and SharePoint integrate with Teams, users can pull word documents from their cloud storage into Teams. Equally, they can create new word documents directly in Teams, and co-author them with users.
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PowerPoint
Of all the Office apps, PowerPoint may have the most interesting integrations with Teams. The most noteworthy integration is the Presentation mode in Teams meetings. When a user enters Presentation mode, they will be able to load a PowerPoint presentation in the meeting. Teams meetings even have specific types of views designed for when someone is presenting.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the main examples of how Microsoft Teams acts as the lynchpin for the Microsoft 365 productivity model. Any company with experience in Office 365 consulting will be able to confirm that the integrations between Teams and the rest of the M365 stack are very extensive – this is precisely why Microsoft call it a collaboration platform.
