5 Ways to Make Microsoft Teams Work Harder for Your Business

Whether by choice or by necessity, it's no secret that Microsoft Teams has taken the world by storm and has become a vital platform in today's working world.

Many may still be asking, however, what is Teams and how can it benefit my business? Mike Korkidakis, Head of Distribution at Wavenet, talks through the key features that will help you make Teams work harder…

Real-Time Presence

I share this feature with my partners and end-users all the time because we simply can't get away from the benefits of a presence-based unified platform.

Microsoft Teams displays each user’s presence in real-time, indicating their current availability and status to other users, i.e. giving people a real-time view of what their colleagues are doing. Being able to physically see someone's availability makes a huge difference to productivity, as it encourages the selection of the most effective and productive form of communication, while maintaining an audit trail.

Before presence-based products, you were blindly trying to communicate and, in most cases, not connecting or things were missed. A truly collaborative presence-based product with the bonus of calendar synchronisation, therefore adds tremendous value – especially in organisations moving at pace.

Application Integration & Bots

Teams is not just another tool, but a platform; one that is fully integrated into Microsoft 365. Not only does it store the seamless interactions between meetings, channels, chats, attachments, notes, files, email, and calendars, but it also includes all the classic Microsoft tools.

Teams is also continually being updated by Microsoft and as well as hosting the traditional product stack, Teams integrates with additional modern workplace tools including Planner, OneNote, Delve, Graph, and of course PowerBI. This entire Microsoft stack not only opens up real-time collaboration but also customisation through bot enablement. This further increases the ability to work in the most efficient way using artificial intelligence with an extensive and specialist knowledge base.

Teams Developer Platform and Power Apps

The Teams Developer Platform opens up required and specific integrations within Microsoft Teams. This can be anything from social media engagement applications, business processes, or business systems, all of which can be implemented within the developer platform using open APIs. This again can be even further enhanced and customised through power apps and the power platform, which enables the build of professional-grade apps for things like workflow solutions, while equipping developers with the tools needed to extend application capabilities with Azure functions and connectors to on-premises or proprietary systems.

Cloud and Security

As a cloud-based platform, Microsoft Teams is readily available and accessible from anywhere, with a seamless UX across various devices. Users also have the security benefits of Single Sign On with Multifactor Authentication and secure guest access. The actual data stored within Teams resides in Microsoft's hyper-scale cloud which gives the option for local data residency if needed.

Advanced security and compliance capabilities exist to no end, with Teams and the M365 stack meeting the compliance standards you would expect – ISO 27001, ISO 27018, SSAE 16 SOC 1, HIPAA BAA and more.

Voice/Direct routing

All the features you need are wrapped into Microsoft Teams, so why not take the internal collaboration benefits and extend those to the external environment too?

Enabling Teams voice allows you to then use a single client and all the aforementioned benefits, and extend it into the external telephony world – especially when utilising a direct routing provider that specialises in telephony. You can extend all this customisation and automation into your phone system too, and open up a wide range of enterprise-level features wrapped around the Teams interface. Think compliant call recording, contact centre features, full integration with multi-channel contact centre solutions and even CRM integration and customised reporting.

This is why Vapour has partnered with Wavenet – to deliver an advanced directing routing telephony solution for Microsoft Teams. TeamsLink is packed full of additional features including group voicemails, mask CLI, advanced disaster recovery, international DDIs for over 90 countries, plus additional add-ons to enable Contact Centre functionality including call queues and skill-based routing.