3 reasons Microsoft Teams is the collaborative workspace you need

According to Microsoft, the average employee sits on twice as many teams as they did five years ago.

On top of this, collaborative work involves 80% more of that employee’s time.

Ultimately, this means that an employee has to split their mind in a million different directions at once — and then, spend more time doing it (which is obviously problematic).

Jumping from team to team and from project to project will only lead to chaos, and that chaos will lead to missed opportunities and glaring inefficiencies.

However, this is only the case if you can’t find a way to realistically manage all of this back-and-forth jumping. And luckily for you, tools like Microsoft Teams exist.

With this particular tool, your entire team is granted a chat-based workspace. Teams acts as a central hub where conversations are created and work happens.

Here are a few of the ways Microsoft Teams can help your team do more, by jumping less.

Threaded Chats

If you’ve ever used a tool like Slack, then you’ll have a basic understanding of how Microsoft Teams works.

Conversations are handled in threads, which means they’re layered. Unlike other chat-based team apps, an idea isn’t lost in a sea of comments. You can reply to specific conversations or start a different conversation by sending out a new message. All messages can be liked or saved and then searched for at a later date.

Threads can also be organized by specific channels — like by topic, department, or project. Or you can have private discussions with individual people or groups of people.

To take things a step further, Teams integrates with Skype. So if you need to have a phone or video conference with another person, it only takes a few clicks to get started. (You can even view your upcoming meetings from within Teams.)

In other words, you don’t need to do any jumping.

Powerful Integrations

If you really want to limit jumping, then you need the ability to access your productivity suite from within your communication hub — so that’s exactly what Teams does for you.

Microsoft Teams integrates with all Office tools, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Just as it is with Skype, you can naturally move from one tool to the next — with minimal clicks and zero jumps.

This means you can actually edit a document from inside Teams.

On top of this, Teams is also capable of integrating with other powerful business apps such as ZenDesk, Trello, Hootsuite, and Asana.

File-sharing Capabilities

What good would integrations be if you couldn’t share the documents created within those integrations?

With Teams, you can send and receive files with ease, and you can even have conversations centered around uploaded documents.

So let’s say that you upload an Excel spreadsheet into a channel. You can view the document inside Teams, edit the document if needed, and attach comments and suggestions to the document, as well.

Conversations attached to documents remain attached to them. So if you open the document inside Teams at a later time, you can still view previous conversations.

These documents are also automatically stored in the cloud, which means that you’ll always have access to the latest version of a document. You never miss a beat and never have to jump from place to place to find “that one document from that one time.”

If you’d like to learn more about Microsoft Teams, we’d love to help. Give us a call today, and let’s talk Teams.