If your company isn’t already using it, chances are they might be very soon as Covid-19 and government advice sends a lot of the UK workforce home.

A recent study from the IT professional network, Spiceworks, has found that Teams is now the second most popular business chat app, (coming behind Skype for Business) after only launching around two years ago. It also reported that 41% of IT professionals expect their employer to start using the collaboration tool by the end of 2020.

So if that’s what your employees are expecting, why the sudden appetite? More than half of IT professionals reportedly felt that collaborative chat apps are critical to their organisations success. But what makes Microsoft Teams better than good old email and should you invest, we’ve outlined the top benefits of Teams to help you decide:

Chats are just the beginning

You can use it for instant chat between your colleagues when an email is just plain overkill, but it’s so much more than that. In Teams you can access, share, and edit Word docs, PowerPoint, and Excel files in real time. No more sending out different versions through email with no one knowing which is the most up to date version to work from. You can add comments and to-dos, and chat with your colleagues to discuss the document right there and then.

Clean up your inbox

By moving your conversations, files and all round collaboration away from Outlook, you’ll be surprised at how tidy and organised your inbox will look. With Microsoft Teams you can say goodbye to email after email, reply all after reply all and instead enjoy more structure with dedicated channels relating to the projects that are important to you. You’ll have a really handy General channel for all things related to your company, but you can also set up individual channels for whatever you like, inviting specific people rather than everyone. This keeps the conversation on topic and avoids unnecessary distractions.

Seamless integration with Office 365

If you’re already enjoying the benefits of Office 365, Microsoft Teams naturally integrates wonderfully with all the other familiar applications you’re already using; Word, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote etc. You can also access all of these applications in one location, rather than having to open up multiple applications, clogging up your desktop and causing confusion!

It’s truly anytime, anywhere on any device

Working from home (as many of us already are)? No problem. Out of the country (unlikely right now)? No problem. No matter where you are or what device you’re on, you can access Teams via the handy app on both Android, Windows and iOS. With its comprehensive web interface you can collaborate on the go, day and night using instant chat, voice conversations and even video calling.

The heart of teamwork

As well as the ability for private 121 chats, with project focused channels, you can engage the right people instantly with threaded chats through group conversations. With group threads, you can increase productivity and increase collaboration all without the need to book a meeting, find a room, find a time that suits everyone and then for everyone to forget what was said in the meeting anyway. You can then refer back to these group conversations, at any time, on the go whenever you need it. There’s no need to worry about losing personality and culture on Teams either, with emojis, stickers, GIFs and custom memes your employees can still be themselves and have fun whilst getting the job done.

Safe and Secure, just like you’d expect

Lastly but maybe most importantly, Microsoft Teams provides the advanced security and compliance capabilities that all Office 365 customers expect. Teams enforces team-wide and organisation-wide two-factor authentication, single sign-on through Active Directory, and encryption of data in transit and at rest. Teams will also support key compliance standards including EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and more. It’s served out of a hyper-scale global network of data centres, automatically provisioned within Office 365 and managed centrally, just as any other Office 365 service. So in a nutshell, you can rest assured your data in Teams is in pretty safe hands.

Easy to deploy, simple to use and with fantastic audio and video quality, its fair to say, once you start using Microsoft Teams, you’ll probably wonder how you ever coped without it.

We’re entering a really challenging time for businesses worldwide to continue operations with minimal impact on productivity and customer service. In fact, technology has never been so crucial to our survival. If you’re unexpectedly needing to quickly implement Office 365 and Teams, call us now on 01392 207 193 or email us and we’ll have you up and running in no time.

If you’re about to manage a remote workforce, check out our top tips for preparing your business for remote working.

For general advice and support on anything IT related, we’re here to help, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.