Rethinking Your IT With A Decentralized Workforce – Chapter 2: Collaboration with Microsoft 365

With remote hybrid work increasing during the pandemic, it is vital to know how you can rethink your IT. Collaboration tools are essential when your workforce is not in the same place every day. Let’s look at a few handy tools that will help improve your workflow. 

Collaboration in Microsoft 365

As a leading software in collaboration, Microsoft 365 provides a host of ways you can keep connected with your workforce, some of the most popular ones are:

•   Document collaboration
•   File storage and sharing
•   Messaging, videoconferencing and telephony
•   Project management

Let’s look at some of the most popular collaboration features in Microsoft 365. 

Document collaboration within the Office suite

Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint are, arguably, the most popular Microsoft apps for most businesses. Now, within Microsoft 365, employees can easily create, share and collaborate in real time within the documents they need to prepare and present in just a few clicks thanks to the online versions of the well-known office suite. 

It makes working on documents much smoother than sending multiple versions of the same documents between team members, especially in a hybrid or completely remote working reality, helping businesses get more done in a streamlined manner.

File storage and sharing

Secured file storage and sharing is among the most important features required by businesses of all sizes to ensure both productivity and security. Thanks to OneDrive and SharePoint, it’s incredibly easy to work on cloud-first platforms for all types of files and easily share them within or outside the organization.

Teams and organizations can easily create shared documents and folders, create role-specific accesses and manage how, when and why documents and folders are shared, accessed and edited. All that happens seamlessly in the Cloud, making it easy for virtually everyone to access, review and edit documents from any device, at any given time.

Messaging, videoconferencing and telephony

As a vast majority of today’s workforce is working remotely, instant messaging and easy videoconferencing is a must to maintain the level of productivity businesses we’re used to in the office. 

Microsoft Teams’ adoption has been a game changer for a lot of businesses as it empowers users with easy access to chat, video conferencing and telephony features, inside and outside of an organization. 

Teams creates a 360 collaborating hub for businesses by helping them easily chat, setup video conferences and even add IP telephony features, all while being connected to numerous everyday apps like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, the Adobe suite, and many more.

Project Management

Working together on different projects and tasks can quickly become a challenge. Thanks to Microsoft Teams and Projects, coworkers can now easily bounce ideas, plan tasks and projects and instantly sync the information through the cloud to make project management as smooth as it ever was. Available on any device through the Cloud, it takes the toll of scheduling continuous meetings to make sure all stakeholders are aware of the task at hand.

Conclusion

Collaboration tools and possibilities have never been so important. Microsoft 365 offers much more than the couple highlight features we’ve covered here and helps businesses of all sizes turbocharge their productivity with powerful and easy to use collaboration features.

To learn more on how your business can leverage the power of Microsoft 365 to increase its productivity, whether your workforce is working in a fully remote or hybrid manner, reach out to one of our MicroAge locations.