Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams also offers a reliable, cloud-based telephony plus calling solution that allows you to connect with anybody. This can enable you to save cost, reduce hardware dependencies, and leverage the power of the Microsoft Cloud.

The base for calling (telephony) is the Microsoft Phone System which is a fully integrated, software-based PBX in Microsoft Teams. It allows you to have enterprise phone features for all Office 365 users in your organization and manage their telephony completely in the cloud.

Microsoft customers can then choose 3 different approaches to have dial-tone added to their Microsoft Phone System deployment.

• We offer the Microsoft Calling Plan which allows users to have a dedicated phone number for placing and receiving domestic and international calls. Currently we service 8 countries and we continue to add new countries. In this model, Microsoft is your dial plan provider. The value to you is that you have one provider for calling – less vendors means less points of failure and one vendor to resolve issues.
• Customers can alternatively choose to use their local Telco provider for dial tone and connect those “trunks” to Microsoft. This exists today for Skype for Business Online and we anticipate this to become available in the middle of CY2018 for Microsoft Teams.
• And for customers with offices located in many geographies, we expect and will support a mix of Microsoft Calling Plan usage and Telco provided dial tone, typically based upon user location.

How do different departments use Teams?

Marketing teams can manage go-to-market, public relations, event planning and their budget within Teams. They can add guests e.g. agencies with secure guest access. They can connect relevant third-party services to each channel, such as Bing News Alerts, Twitter Connector, Adobe Creative Cloud, HootSuite and YouTube.

Sales teams can manage sales planning, RFP/Proposals. Teams provides a single place where all this collaboration, reporting and knowledge sharing can happen. They can set up monthly business reviews as meetings in Teams. Document sharing e.g. sales playbooks can be done from within Teams. They can also use apps like PowerBI, Planner or even task management apps like Trello.

Finance teams can conduct their finance reviews within Teams and also share content around, business insights, audits, and compliance. Teams provides a hub in which all files, data, conversations and meetings can happen in a single place, safely and securely. They can easily share files like annual financial statement review or audit report and use apps like Excel, PowerBI, Planner or even pin critical files, internal or external websites to a tab

HR teams can manage their recruitment, training, events, and reviews from within Teams. Teams provides a single hub where HR professionals can collaborate, plan, share notes and communicate decisions. They can upload files to the channels e.g. HR policies, candidate information, offers extended, training or recruitment guidance notes, internal websites, feedback forms and surveys. Use a shared One Note or Wiki for candidate feedback. They can use Teams for training calls in Teams and do post training surveys on third party apps like Survey Monkey.

IT can leverage Teams a hub for service strategy, problem, incident and change, deployment, health and reporting, readiness and adoption, support and management and governance. They can set up connectors e.g. bots for process automation.

Engineering teams can leverage Teams for go-to-market, feature releases, testing, feedback, competitive information, research and product analytics. They can set up connectors or tabs for VSTS, JIRA, BitBucket and GitHub or leverage developer tools like Botkit. Teams enables continuous discussion across a distributed team and is integrated with developer tools.

Project teams can leverage teams for planning, budget, analytics, reviews and feedback. They can use apps like Planner, PowerBI or set up connectors e.g. bots for process automation. Teams enables collaboration in one central hub with all the tools needed to manage a project.

When people collaborate today, they leverage social tools– 45% use social technologies in their day-to-day work. Users also work across more devices – in the past five years, the number of devices per user has increased by 400%. The mobile phone has completely changed how we communicate and work. Many users live on their phone. In addition, people use different apps and services resulting in them having to jump between different experiences during the day.

The workforce itself is more diverse. For the first time, there are five generations together in the workplace, – all with a different background in technology and different expectations about communication and collaboration tools. For example (hold up the phone if available), some people are comfortable chatting on the phone, others prefer e-mail or face to face. Teams are increasingly geo-distributed. Employees are no longer necessarily in the same office, let alone the same time zone. Per IDC, 72.3 percent of employees will be working remotely by 20205, making it more challenging to have face-to-face conversations. There’s a greater need to enable communications and collaboration – regardless of geography.

There is also a movement towards transparency and inclusivity in how decisions are made. Organization structures are becoming more flat. People are on twice as many teams as they were five years ago. And those teams are dynamic. It’s rare that people don’t change on a multi-month project. And when someone leaves, the first step is for all to go through their e-mail to find the information needed to get the new person up to speed. Being on more teams has also led to a dramatic increase in the amount of collaboration. The new way of work is team-based and collaborative. Workers report that 80 % of their time at work is spent collaborating.