Collaboration is the key to a successful business, and with Microsoft 365, businesses have a wealth of products and services that facilitate great collaboration.
No matter what type of business an organisation is, they rely on their workforce to be productive together. A business where colleagues don’t work well together is sure to fail eventually. Nowadays, technology can do a lot to make collaboration easier and more efficient for businesses; we spoke to TechQuarters, a provide of outsourced IT support London-based businesses have been relying on since 2010. When we asked them about the best collaboration solutions on the market, their preference was Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 Collaboration Tools
As most people in business will be aware of by now, Microsoft 365 is the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Office suite – which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and Outlook, as well as a number of other services that provide businesses with all the functionality they need to complete business tasks and workflows. The greatest value that M365 offers is its many collaboration-enhancing features. According to TechQuarters, who are an IT Support Company London businesses love working with, Microsoft 365 is the best solution for business collaboration because of how interconnected all the different products and services are; all of the products included in M365 are built on Microsoft Graph, which acts as a nexus point for all the data and intelligence that flows between the different apps and services.
So, what are some of the different collaboration tools included in M365?
1. Project Management
Businesses often manage large workloads by organising it as a project, whether it be a long-term project, or a small team project. Microsoft 365 offers several products that can help optimize project management for organisations. These include:
- Microsoft Project – The most heavyweight project management solution, Projects is ideal for cloud-based project tracking and management, as well as developing project proposals for distribution. Project is best used for long-term projects.
- Microsoft Planner – Ideal for team projects and short-term work, Planner is a cloud-based task management app that allows teams to divide work into projects, and further allocate tasks within a project. Planner is a standalone app, but data from the app can be accessed natively in Teams and SharePoint.
2. Video Conferencing
Video conferencing is something that most businesses have become very familiar with over the last 3 years. According to TechQuarters, who provided IT support Guildford and London businesses relied on during the pandemic (and the subsequent lockdowns), stated that videoconferencing remains a crucial part of their customer service, as well as playing a major role in internal collaborative efforts.
According to TechQuarters, Microsoft Teams is the best video conferencing solution on the market. For businesses that already use other Microsoft products, the integrations between apps like PowerPoint (for live presentations in meetings), and many other M365 apps and services, means that video meetings are excellent for synchronous collaboration.
3. Instant Messaging
Another function that Microsoft Teams offers businesses is instant messaging. Though it may not seem like a powerful collaborative feature, it is actually a very useful thing to have at your disposal. For example, remote colleagues can easily get in touch with one another through instant messaging; and there are many scenarios where instant messaging is a better means of communication than things like telephone or video calls – because it is fast and unobtrusive for all parties involved. Instant messaging can be used for sharing spontaneous ideas, requesting non-urgent information from a colleague, or posting information (e.g. an image, document, or other file) to colleagues.
4. Real-time Co-authoring
As we have already mentioned, Microsoft Graph means that all the apps and services in Microsoft 365 can exchange data instantaneously. One of the best ways that this feature is utilized for collaboration is with real-time co-authoring. In other words, two or more individuals can work on the same version of a document remotely, with little to no latency. For instance two colleagues might jump on a teams call, and at the same time, open the same document on their respective devices – this would allow the colleagues to remotely communicate and collaborate on a piece of work.
