Reimagining collaboration workspaces to amplify user performance

Introduction

Microsoft Teams is unquestionably the most effective tool for online collaboration that cuts down downtime and improves remote workforce efficiency. Centralized information storage, real-time co-authoring, easy tracking of projects, monitoring of teams activities – the list of online collaboration benefits of MS Teams just goes on.

It is fascinating how Microsoft Teams is evolving with the pace of change by upgrading its capabilities, thus, making it more flexible and interesting before users ask or think.

In this blog, we will share some quick tips on how to help your employees brainstorm and innovate flawlessly to give your organization the agility that it needs using Microsoft Teams latest features. Let’s start:

1. End-to-end meeting solution

To support fluid communication, Microsoft offers a more realistic visual experience for large-scale meetings and events with a feature called Together Mode. Then, using Dynamic View, you can control how and what you want to see in Teams meeting. Next, using custom layouts, presenters can customize the content they want to share with other attendees in a meeting.

Also, there are breakout rooms using which organizers are able to split up participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or workgroup discussions. Additionally, using new Teams meeting extensions, organizers can access apps from either AppSource or the Teams store and add them as they schedule the meeting. Moreover, after a meeting in Teams, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files, and more will be automatically created in Teams.

Besides all these features, Teams also provides support for attendee registration with automated emails to manage attendance. It also lets you view a reporting dashboard after the meeting to grab insights into attendee engagement. 

Microsoft Teams Calling got further enhancements which include a streamlined view that displays contacts, voicemail, and calling history at once. Using this, you can initiate a return call with a single click. Moreover, in the new advanced communications plan, Teams can support up to 20,000 participants with the ability to use live captions.

2. Better visibility for corporate news and announcements

For a connected employee experience, Teams offers a home site app to be used as your own corporate intranet. You can customize it to match your organization’s branding, and pin it to the app bar in Teams for quick access to search and a personalized view of news and important sites.

3. Devices for future workspace

As organizations continue the transition back to the office, Microsoft presents devices for the workspace of the future. Microsoft Teams offers shared space devices like Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub as critical tools in delivering the ultimate hybrid workplace experience.

Microsoft Teams panels, a new category of devices can be mounted outside of a meeting space to notify participants of scheduling and occupancy and to assist with wayfinding around the office. Microsoft is enabling additional ways to engage with in-room devices without touches such as the Room remote app, Teams casting, and voice assistance with Microsoft Cortana.

4. Improved focus on people

As organizations face uncertainty and change, company leaders need visibility into how work is evolving and how changes are affecting the people whose creativity and innovation will propel their business into the future.

A new stay-connected experience in Teams helps individuals nurture bonding with their colleagues by allowing them to praise top performers for key achievements and to schedule 1:1s to catch up. It also helps you stay on top of your commitments by intelligently surfacing suggested tasks and emails from Outlook—plus @mentions in Teams—that might require follow-up.

Using Workplace Analytics into Teams, managers get a line of sight into teamwork norms like after-hours collaboration, focus time, meeting effectiveness, and cross-company connections. 

5. Creating a secure experience for employees

Microsoft regularly assesses and enhances its security and compliance capabilities to make systems reliable for data protection and defensive against cyberattacks. 

Applications like Microsoft 365 Defender and Azure Defender, prevents, detects, and responds to threats across identities, endpoints, applications, email, infrastructure, and cloud platforms. Similarly, Microsoft introduced Azure Active Directory Application Proxy capabilities and partner integrations, as well as new Microsoft 365 connectors and Microsoft Graph APIs to protect identities, apps, and services across your entire environment, both in and outside of Microsoft.

Clearly, Microsoft Teams is natively protected but collaboration security in Teams poses a complex set of IT challenges. Hence, it is pivotal to build a tight firewall of governance around it. Overlooking governance before deploying MS Teams opens the doors for infringement.

While implementing security policies, it is important to cover all the bases right without overstepping governance which can negatively impact end-user productivity. Hence, we advise you to approach a consultant to guide you through needful steps for securing Teams environment.

Alternatively, you can use our third-party governance software, TeamsHUB by Cyclotron, for delivering an unparalleled user experience while safeguarding your Teams platform.

6. Automate processes and workflows

Let the best out of Teams collaboration emerge by automating workflows and processes. Take a complete control on Microsoft Teams by implementing automated policies and allow your users to focus on collaboration.

Using automation in Microsoft Teams, you can activate self-service provisioning of team creation, manage lifecycle of teams, automate external workflows, visualize team activity through real-time reports, track externally shared files and more, all from an intuitive and unified interface. Wonder, how to implement automation in MS Teams?

There are two ways of doing it. First, you can design an in-house solution from a lot of options available in Azure stack. However, if want to save your valuable time and resources, you must choose the second option that is, a governance automation software such as TeamsHUB by Cyclotron. TeamsHUB by Cyclotron can be deployed immediately to simplify your administrative workloads so that there is no waste of time.

Conclusion

TeamsHUB by Cyclotron is designed to automate MS Teams governance, drive employee engagement and boost adoption. It is one complete and reliable solution that meets all your governance needs without having you to write a single line of code.

Moreover, it saves you from paying hefty bills on impractical solutions that get complex over time. Hence, to derive full potential from MS Teams, use TeamsHUB by Cyclotron to help your people collaborate safely and flourish within organizational boundaries.

If you want to learn more about governance using TeamsHUB by Cyclotron, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo