Moving to the cloud can be a daunting prospect for any organisation, and to remove that fear there are several key questions that every business needs to answer before they start their journey:
- What should I migrate?
- How should I do it?
- How do I manage costs?
But if you’re a not for profit organisation, the questions just keep coming:
- How can you ensure value is being found from your vital funding?
- Will there be disruption to vital support for service users?
- How can you complete a cloud migration with the limited resources many charities have?
To be able to proceed confidently you need a secure and safe starting point. A platform that you know will help you to make a positive change within your organisation and an expert partner to support your journey without exposing your organisation to risk.
A place from which you can take advantage of the vast possibilities in the cloud to transform the digital capabilities of your organisation. You need a safe landing zone and an expert partner to help you build it.
What are Landing Zones?
Landing zones are one of the first stages in Microsoft’s recommended Cloud Adoption Framework. Designed to help you build your own scalable Azure platform, the Azure Landing Zone is designed to give you a platform to build the scalable environment you want in Azure whilst meeting security and governance goals.
So how can the Landing Zone concept be applied to charities looking for growth in the cloud?
Get the Basic Building Blocks In Place
The landing zone concept refers to an environment that has been provisioned and prepared to host the essential workloads that you will be moving into Azure. In simple terms, this means making sure that you have ready the compute, network, storage and data you will need to successfully scale up in the cloud.
For not for profit organisations this could mean starting from the key services you provide to the people you engage with and working backwards from there.
For example, if your organisation works in social care, what are the applications that staff making visits require and what resources need to be applied to keep them working? If you have a webchat service that can be a key first port of call for people who need help, how can you make it more efficient and effective by hosting it in Azure?
Build Governance From The Start
Effective governance is vital in any not for profit organisation, and nothing changes when looking to scale in Azure! Keeping track of the access, costs and security of your Azure environment is perhaps the key component of building a scalable and trusted platform for growth.
In the landing zone process, this means creating a clear plan for costs, access control, subscription level policies and more. For many not for profits this means the senior IT decision-maker working with a partner such as Cloud Direct as an Azure Expert MSP to ensure this is consistently built into the platform.
Understand The Risks But Avoid The Myths!
There are many myths about moving infrastructure to the cloud, many of which contribute to organisations holding themselves back from scaling their environments in Azure.
These myths can be particularly effective in the not for profit sector, where budgets and teams are tight and all resources are focused on the achievement of the overall mission.
The Azure Landing Zone process helps you to manage these concerns and make decisions based on the facts available. If something isn’t viable to move into the cloud yet, keep it out of the Landing Zone and build your hybrid strategy. For the other aspects of your infrastructure, our experts can work with you to optimise them for a scalable future in the cloud – with clarity on the costs and performance that give you the facts instead of the myths.
Like what you hear and ready to learn more? Download our landing zones webinar today!
Our Azure Expert, Matt Leach, shows why landing zones are one of the first stages in Microsoft’s recommended Cloud Adoption Framework.
In this webinar we explore:
- What are Azure landing zones?
- How do landing zones help to achieve your security and governance goals?
- Building your scalable Azure platform
We recently partnered with Microsoft to host a legal roundtable in Bristol. Bringing together leading legal IT teams from across the South West to ask how legal businesses are utilising cloud technology to drive business growth. During this event, we discussed the trends and challenges the legal industry are currently facing and what Microsoft technologies can be used to help overcome these.
Don’t worry if you couldn’t attend. We’ve written up the key discussion points here, so you don’t have to miss a thing.
“Business as usual is not an option for many, indeed for any, traditional legal service providers. Innovation in services and service delivery will become a key differentiating factor.”
The Law Society ‘The Future of Legal Services’
Microsoft kicked off the discussion outlining the current trends and challenges legal businesses are facing. Which can be categorised into two key areas; Managing the realities of regulations, disruptive technology and changing business models and Meeting the expectations of increasingly digitally savvy clients.
We highlighted security as the biggest challenge many legal businesses are facing. With the cost of a security breach in the legal industry over £2,000,000 you can see why. So, we looked at how Microsoft cloud technology can help legal firms achieve their strict security goals by taking advantage of Microsoft’s annual investment of $1,000,000 in cyber security. This goes towards helping businesses enable digital transformation through a comprehensive platform, unique intelligence, and broad partnerships.
Microsoft then went on to discuss how legal businesses can start digitally transforming their business to keep up with changing industry trends. They broke it down into four key steps:
- Engage your clients. The technologies available now will provide you with new and efficient ways to engage with your customers.
- Optimise your matters. This will involve optimising your operations with the technology available, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
- Empower your professionals. Provide your employees with the digital tools they need. Allowing them to do what they do best.
- Transform your proposition. This will involve transforming your products and services through the latest technology.
Cloud Direct’s Lead Azure Consultant, Jeff Field, spoke about which Microsoft technologies legal business can adopt to help them digitally transform and meet the expectations of their clients and workforce.
Azure Sentinel
Azure Sentinel can help the legal industry continuously monitor security analytics for your entire business. In short, it provides you with a 360 view across your entire business highlighting any security alerts and sophisticated attacks. Microsoft Azure Sentinel focuses on monitoring four key areas;
- Collecting data at a cloud-scale
- Detect previously undetected threats
- Investigate threats with artificial intelligence
- Respond to incidents rapidly
Windows Virtual Desktop
Windows Virtual Desktop is a comprehensive VDI that’s delivered in Azure.
WVDI allows your legal business to deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure with ease. This will open your business up to creating a flexible workplace where staff can work from different locations of different devices, opening your business up to a range of different opportunities.
Legal businesses are known for having legacy apps, which is why WVDI allows you to manage specialised workloads, including these legacy apps you have. And what’s best is WVDI allows your legal business to stay secure whilst meeting regulations.
Talk to an expert
If you want to find out more about how your legal business can adopt Microsoft technologies, then get in contact with our experts. We’d be happy to provide you with a copy of the slides from the event and discuss any of the topics in more detail.
As the spread of Covid-19 changes working practices for businesses all over the world, the requirement for staff to be able to work from home effectively is in the spotlight more than ever before. It has been predicted that at its peak, 20% of the UK could be off work.
There can be no doubt that instructing employees in high-risk areas to work from home can be an effective strategy for stopping the spread of the virus, but how can you manage the potential implications for business productivity?
CNN has called the outbreak the ‘biggest work from home experiment in history’ and the changes bought about from it have the potential to permanently change the way that many businesses work in the long term if they prove to be successful.
Microsoft has released some guidance on the issue, and staff at leading companies across the world have already been advised to work from home wherever they can.
Many organisations are facing the prospect of making the transition to a work from home culture almost overnight, with little time to prepare or implement new tools or policies.
At Cloud Direct we already have a distributed workforce, with staff working from home and our offices in various locations.
Our remote working policy is well established and has been refined over time, so what are some of the key factors we have learnt that you could learn from?
Make use of the tools available for working from home
Many businesses already have access to unified communication tools that are not being used to their full potential. One of the most common and effective of these applications is Microsoft Teams. The full Teams solution is included in all Office 365 subscriptions of Business Premium or above, and there are even free tiers you can use to get started with connecting your users.
Microsoft Teams includes a range of features to keep your organisation productive whilst everyone works from home, including:
- Live chat and collaboration features to keep communication lines open
- Video call capabilities built in to keep meetings going ahead
- Connected apps for collaborative work on files
- 3rd party integration for a wide range of apps and plugins
At Cloud Direct, Teams is central to our business, with the majority of meetings both internal and external set up through the application and all files accessible through integration with Sharepoint. Our team members communicate and collaborate easily wherever they happen to be located all through the single application view that Teams provides.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Having staff working remotely makes communication crucial. Even more so than before. It’s easy for team members to quickly feel isolated when they are used to the natural conversations that occur throughout a working day in an office.
Combat this by setting regular catch up calls during the working from home period. Have a set time each day where all members of a team can ‘huddle’ and share their task list, any planned meetings and cover any recent updates or achievements can make a big difference to the morale and spirit of a remote team.
At Cloud Direct each manager runs these regular huddles, ensuring all team members are included and contributing to the shared goals of the business. Supplemented by the chat feature in teams, this regular communication means one of the key blockers to remote and home working is overcome.
Consider how teams work differently
Using technology to work remotely may come as second nature to many, with some of the more tech-savvy departments and staff in businesses potentially already using applications such as Slack or Microsoft Teams to collaborate on tasks and communicate wherever they are.
Others may need a period of adjustment to make working from home effective for them and may require additional support and training to allow them to be productive. It’s important for team members must be provided with the tools they need to feel comfortable in their newly adapted roles, even if the working from home period is a short term enforced one.
Enabling these workers in the short term to adapt to the current situation will pay off further in the long term when they are enabled to work and collaborate in new ways. From any location
Make security your #1 priority
When staff start working remotely, they will be connecting from networks that are not provided or controlled by the company. This can increase the risks associated with their work and you should have the tools and policies in place to guard against this.
Before moving to a work from home policy ensure you’ve got all grounds covered. Make sure you’ve taken the simple steps such as enabling Multi-Factor Authentication for all users. If you are providing laptops and other equipment to staff, ensure that they have up to date firewalls, device encryption, web filtering and other security measures applied. Set clear policies for working on public Wi-Fi networks and add encrypted VPNs where possible so that sensitive information is not being accessed on open networks. Providing a secure workplace, in and out of the office, should be a priority for your business.
These steps should be supported by regular training and security awareness updates for staff. In the case that working from home needs to be enforced at short notice, create a clear one-page document that aligns the key security policies and expectations for your organisation that is accepted by all team members before they start remote working.
When it comes to increasing security in Microsoft, Cloud Direct can support with a range of solutions including
Getting started with working from home
Whether widespread working from home will be enforced in the UK over the coming months remains to be seen. However, by implementing effective tools and creating robust policies, you can put your business in a strong position for building a flexible and adaptable modern workforce enabled by technology.
The threat landscape is ever changing, meaning protecting email for your business can be an intimidating task.
Whilst unsophisticated brute force attacks remain common and building a strong gateway defense against these is vital, threats are increasingly coming from attackers that are using a variety of smart techniques to avoid detection.
This is illustrated by the fact that only 7% of spear phishing attacks come as a result of direct business email compromise. The rest take advantage of techniques that are much harder to detect, such as domain impersonation and conversation hijacking amongst others.
Many of these attacks rely on social engineering and human vulnerability rather than technical means, meaning most email threat protection solutions and strategies are unable to detect them.
The costs to businesses from these types of attack can be very high.
So what forms can these attacks take?
Account Takeover
Account takeover is where a hacker is able to gain access to an account using legitimate log in credentials (often taken from some of the large scale leaks that have been widely reported) which are then repurposed and used for malicious means.
Stealing of credentials in this way takes advantage of the fact that many people re-use the same passwords for different log ins. In this form of attack criminals can impersonate the true owner of the account and for example ask for money to be transferred into an account that appears legitimate.
Spear Phishing & Social Engineering
Spear phishing is an attempt to gain access to unauthorised information by targeting a specific individual. Emails are spoofed to appear as if they come from a trusted source, often with an urgent request for an action. Once a user clicks, they are then taken to a page that installs malware or captures important details that the hacker can use.
Spear phishing differs from phishing in that it is aimed at specific individuals (for example a company CFO) with the intention of getting them to complete a specific action and these attacks are often engineered over time.
Domain Spoofing & Impersonation
This is a variation of phishing where communications are designed to impersonate legitimate domains or sources. For example, an email address may be misspelt by one letter with the intention that the recipient will not notice such a minor difference. These email addresses are then used to send communications that appear to be genuine, with the aim of instigating money transfers and compromising other information through forms and malware.
So how can you protect yourself against them?
Luckily there are some key steps you can take to protect your business.
- Educate employees — Teach your employees how to recognise email attacks such as phishing, business email compromise, and conversation hijacking, as well has how to report suspicious messages. Use phishing simulation such as Barracuda Phishline to train users to identify cyberattacks, test the effectiveness of your training, and evaluate the users most vulnerable to attacks
- Add account-takeover protection — Make sure you have technology in place that can detect and block business email compromise and other impersonation attacks. Barracuda Sentinel is available from Cloud Direct and uses AI based behavioral analysis and awareness of the latest threats to intelligently protect your business.
- Watch for unusual logins or IP addresses — Use an email security solution to identify suspicious activity, including logins from unusual locations and IP addresses, a potential sign of a compromised account.
- Establish policies to confirm transactions — Help employees avoid falling for this type of attack by putting procedures in place to confirm email requests for wire transfers, for example two step sign offs and secure password policies.
- Enforce business wide security policies – Features such as multi-factor authentication are built into Office 365 and will immediately make your business more secure. Ensure all staff are aware of the policy and make usage an essential for access to the system.
How can Cloud Direct help to keep you secure?
Our Modern Workplace Experts build security into every project and integrate solutions such as Microsoft ATP and Barracuda Total Email Protection to ensure customers are protected as best they can be.
We were the first Microsoft partner in the UK to roll out Microsoft 365 for one of our customers, and we closely monitor the Secure Score for each business we work with so that we can make recommendations that will help them stay protected. Our modern workplace experts have put together a number of resources on this subject, showing how you can make use of the secure score for your business.
To find out more about our security services including our modern workplace security kickstart get in contact with a member of our team today.
The retail and hospitality industry has completely transformed in the past decade thanks to the technology that’s become available. Businesses that are not keeping up with these changes are quickly falling behind.
Customers have more choice and convenience than ever thanks to the power of the internet, which is why high-quality service is one of the most valuable assets for retailers in 2020.
- 61% of retailers believe that efficient customer service is the most important factor in providing their customers with the best experience possible.
- Customers are willing to spend up to 16% more on products and services with companies that offer a better experience.
Microsoft has been building on the capabilities of Skype for Business within Microsoft Teams since September 2017. Now Teams has been developed into Microsoft’s one-stop-shop for chats, meetings, calling, collaboration, app integration and file storage. Your employees will have the ability to utilise these tools to provide the first-class customer service your customers deserve.
Here are three ways you can improve your customer service by using Microsoft Teams.
1. Provide staff with the tools they need to sell
It’s normal to see everyone equipped with a smart device, and this is starting to apply to employees on the shop floor too. It’s now becoming the norm for employees to have a mobile device with them whilst at work. Whether this is for taking orders, communicating with others or checking stock levels to avoid running back and forth to the stock room. Being mobile is the nature of the job within the retail sector – you need to share information with employees in different locations. Microsoft Teams allows employees to collaborate and communicate securely, from any location.
And why’s that? Employees will have instant access to all the information they need, can pass on urgent information as a private or group message and communicate with the people they need in seconds. Microsoft Teams allows you to do all of this and more. It’s a centralised hub for you to store and share knowledge with other employees, whether they’re on the shop floor or head office.
79% of customers say being able to engage with knowledgeable store assistants is important.
Customers are now expecting staff to know the answers to all their questions when they are shopping. Microsoft Teams can be used to store and share all sorts of information on products and stock, employee training, in-store promotions and more.
2. Effective workforce management
Managing your team’s time can get complicated, and the challenge many managers face is staying on top of this. It’s important that you effectively manage and organise your team as it will allow you to save time and focus on what really matters. The first step to achieving this is having the right tools in place.
Organising your team’s time has never been easier with Microsoft Teams. A recently added feature in Teams is the schedule management tool, Shifts. It allows you to plan shifts that employees can review and make changes to within their mobile device, all in real-time.
Employees will have the ability to view their upcoming shifts, view who they will be working with, put in a request to swap or pick up extra shifts and request time off. They will be able to manage all of this within Microsoft Teams and managers will be able to add specific activities to a specific shift, allowing employees to ensure tasks get done.
Your team will be able to clock in and out of a shift with one tap on their mobile device, making it easier for both employees and managers to view timesheets at the end of the month.
The Microsoft Teams, Shifts feature provides managers with a holistic view of their team’s tasks and time. Allowing employees to be more efficient during their shifts.
3. Keep employees engaged and motivated
Shop floor workers play a key role in representing your brand. They’re the ones that interact with your customers daily, yet they typically have the highest turnover rate.
Microsoft Teams has a tool called Praise. Praise allows you to recognise your co-worker’s achievements and efforts and share them with the wider business. This feature will not only help motivate employees but keep them engaged when they’re on the shop floor interacting with your customer, helping strengthen and improve your brand.
Companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by 147%.
Engaged employees are more likely to stay in the job for longer. By utilising this tool, you could see your high turnover decrease, giving you more time to train and invest in creating your next dream team.
Want to transform your customer service with Microsoft Teams?
If you’d like to find out more about how your retail or hospitality business can adopt Microsoft Teams, watch our webinar. Our Modern Workplace experts discuss the importance of customer service and how Teams can support this change.
What Is Microsoft Teams?
Teams is Microsoft’s ‘one-stop-shop’ for the communication and collaboration needs of your organisation. Designed as a unified communications (UC) platform, it efficiently combines your workplace chat, video meetings, file storage and application integration.
Back in September 2017, Microsoft announced that Teams would build on the capabilities of Skype for Business. With Skype for Business reaching End of Life on 31st July 2021 and with Teams regularly adding features to its already impressive capabilities, making the upgrade to Microsoft Teams has never been more appealing.
There are many reasons why your Not For Profit should harness the power of Microsoft Teams. We’ve taken the time to explain five reasons why you should consider Teams.
1. Access Whenever, Wherever
Flexible and remote working is nothing new for those in the charity sector, but what is new is the rate in which it is becoming the new norm, with as many as 87% of businesses dependent on their employees’ ability to access mobile business apps from their smartphone. Whether you’re working from the office, at home or even your local coffee shop, you’ll need the ability to access your business-critical applications.
The Microsoft Teams mobile app will keep you connected from anywhere. You’ll have the ability to communicate, share and collaborate on files and join conference calls. All from your smartphone. No matter where you are. Helping you stay connected with your team on the go.
2. Organise and Plan Around Your Team
When files, emails and calls are all happening on different platforms and being saved in different places, things can quickly become unmanageable, greatly effecting team members ability to deliver to your service users.
Microsoft Teams can be used as a centralised hub for all project information. Simply create a channel as part of the project kick-off, and your team will have the latest updates, messages, files, calls and tasks in one centralised location.
3. Collaborate In Real Time
Thanks to cloud technology, the days of sending document edits back and forth over email are gone. Microsoft Teams provides your business with the opportunity to share your documents and collaborate live with colleagues, seeing the changes in real time as you work together.
With charity workers often working together in the office or in the field and across the world, this level of collaboration can drive true transformation in productivity and efficiency.
4. Information Recall – On Demand
Charity teams and volunteers often find themselves needing specific information to hand in remote locations, often at short notice to support service users.
Teams allows you to not only store all your data in a concise and logical way, but also allows you to search for specific items with ease. No more scrolling through email chains to find a conversation you had 7 weeks ago!
5. Maximise Your O365 Licenses
Microsoft Teams is included in all O365 licenses on the not for profit tier – even the donated ones! So, no matter if the license for your organisation is E1, E3, E5 or a combination of all three, you can use teams to transform how you work.
Our Kickstart package is the perfect way to ensure you are making the most of the productivity tools available to you in O365, and you can contact our team today to hear how this can work for you.
All sounds great, doesn’t it? You can learn more and see a live Teams demo from our Modern Workplace experts in our webinar on the 26th March! Register your place today.
High-profile data breaches are making the headlines seemingly every day. Even a passing look at the news in 2019 would have shown breaches at Travelex, Equifax and Capital One, to name just a few. What is clear is that it has never been more important to ensure that you are guarding against potential threats.
Email is still the most popular threat vector. According to a SANS Institute report, 74 percent of cyber attacks originate with an email containing a malicious link or attachment, and attacks are getting more sophisticated as cyber criminals try to bypass security measures by using social engineering tactics that rely on emails that don’t have a malicious payload.
When it comes to email protection, how do you decide which solutions you need and be sure you are protecting against the range of threats you may be exposed to?
You need Total Email Protection
Now available from Cloud Direct, Barracuda Total Email Protection ensures that your organisation is secured against email-borne threats of all types. Its multi-layered approach combines the most advanced protection available with the radical simplicity and ease of use that Barracuda is known for.
What is included in the Total Email Protection Bundle?
- Essentials – Award winning email filtering, spam blocking and more!
- Sentinel – Protection against spear phishing with intelligent AI detection.
- Phishline – Spear Phishing simulation tool to create a human layer of defence.
- Forensics and Incident Response – Automated incident response to attacks.
Our team of modern workplace experts are on hand to discuss all things security with you, whether you are just beginning with O365 and looking for a kickstart or are an experienced M365 user looking for the next layer of security to protect your users.
Sounds good, right?
Use the form below to download the Complete Email Protection Whitepaper from Barracuda to learn more.
You may have already heard the term Azure Lighthouse but what does it mean? And why is it important? We sat down with our Cloud Practice Manager, John Riseam, to find out more about Azure Lighthouse and discuss how Cloud Direct is utilising this recently released Microsoft technology to centralise and optimise our Azure operations.
First off, can you explain what Azure Lighthouse is?
Azure Lighthouse has been designed by Microsoft for service providers, like Cloud Direct, as a single dashboard to view and manage Azure subscriptions centrally and securely. Before Microsoft developed this tech there was a huge administrative overhead required to connect MSP’s with their customer tenants and challenging security access. But now Azure Lighthouse is an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) that lets customers delegate permissions to their MSP to perform management operations on their behalf.
So, how is Cloud Direct using this new technology?
Azure Lighthouse lets us securely and seamlessly access our customer environments and is now our default management plane for all our customers, whether they’re using CSP, EA or PAYG Azure subscriptions. The key benefit to us is the visibility of all our customer tenants in one central portal with the increased management tools which allow our teams to simultaneously monitor and optimise our customers Azure networks more efficiently.
What’s the benefit for Cloud Direct’s customers?
We’re able to further enhance the security we offer customers using technologies such as Microsoft 2 factor authentication, Conditional Access and Advanced Threat protection. Azure Lighthouse also allows us to have a centralised set of security policies that we can apply to all our customers at the same time. So, any patches or new best practice policies can be quickly and efficiently applied.
In addition to these optimisation and security benefits, Azure Lighthouse has also enabled us to develop new managed service offerings, to give our customers even more opportunities to optimise and scale their Azure environments.
Where can people find out more about this and other Azure technologies?
As an Azure Expert MSP, we have an extremely close relationship with Microsoft and pride ourselves on being at the forefront of new Azure technologies and management best practice. All of which we share with our customers to develop and optimise the managed services. Just ask your account manager or take a look at the resources available on our website.
My team of Azure Experts also host regular workshops and events for our current and prospective customers, where they share their best practice top tips and delve into the latest Azure tech. This month we have our Azure landing zone webinar on 30th January, then on the 12th March, we’ll be at Microsoft London Paddington for our thirteenth Azure Roadshow workshop.
Find out more about all our upcoming events here.
91% of the Fortune 100 use Microsoft Teams to get more done during the 9 to 5. We decided to look at the top reasons why!
But first a quick introduction for those of you who aren’t familiar with Teams. It’s Microsoft’s ‘one-stop-shop’ for your business’ communication and collaboration needs. It’s a unified communications (UC) platform that efficiently combines your workplace chat, video meetings, file storage and application integration.
1. Organise your team
Every project and sub-groups can instantly breed another email chain, call notes and host of meetings, which can get messy fast. When files, emails and calls are all happening on different platforms and being saved in different places, things can quickly become unmanageable.
Microsoft Teams can be used as a centralised hub for all project information. You can simply incorporate creating a Microsoft Teams channel as part of the project kick-off, allowing your team to have the latest updates, messages, files, calls and tasks on one centralised location.
2. Access whenever, wherever
As flexible and remote working becomes the new norm, 87% of businesses are dependent on their employees’ ability to access mobile business apps from their smartphone. Whether you’re working from the office, at home or even your local coffee shop, you’ll need the ability to access your business-critical applications.
Microsoft Teams has a mobile app that will keep you connected from anywhere. You’ll have the ability to communicate, share and collaborate on files and join conference calls. All from your smartphone. No matter where you are. Helping you stay connected with your team on the go.
3. Stay in the know
Gone are the days where you sat next to the same people 9 to 5, 7 days a week. With 50% of the UK workforce to be working remotely in 2020, it can be challenging for employees to still communicate effectively.
But Teams can help you keep communication and collaboration channels clear. Whether you’re wanting to call someone, set up a video conference with your team or send a quick instant message, you’ll have clear visibility to see who’s online and available for a chat. Microsoft Teams provides you with the communication tools you need all in one place.
4. Vital information recall
It can be difficult to recall what you discussed in a meeting a few days ago – let alone weeks ago. As a project progresses, you’ll have more files, conversations and meetings building up in your Teams channel. Making it difficult for you to find the information you need from last month’s call. But fear not. Teams allows you to not only store all your data but also search for it with ease. Meaning no more scrolling through email chains to find a conversation you had 7 weeks ago.
5. Collaborate in real-time
Thanks to cloud technology, the days of sending document edits back and forth over email are gone. Microsoft Teams provides your business with the opportunity to share your documents and collaborate live with colleagues. Allowing you to edit, review and comment any document in real-time. Anyone that has access to the document will be able to watch you make changes as you work together. Meaning you’ll be able to collaborate in real-time. No matter where you are.
6. Focus on what matters
If you’re creating a channel for every project you’re working on, then Teams can get busy quite quickly. Which is why it’s important you can focus on what truly matters.
Not every message or file that gets sent in your channel will be relevant for you. And Microsoft Teams allows you to filter out that noise. You can simply filter by personal mentions or responses to your message in the activity feed.
Talk to an expert
Whether you’re looking to find out more about Teams or are ready to start a full Teams migration, our Modern Workplace experts are here to help. So, what are you waiting for? Get in contact to discover how you can harness the power of Microsoft Teams.
Plus, if you’re on Skype for Business Online, please be aware that it goes End of Life 31st July 2021. Which means you’ll no longer be able to use it. We’ve put together a step-by-step guide for a smooth Skype for Business to Teams upgrade to help you prepare your business for the employees. If you would need some help moving from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, then please get in contact with our experts today.