Nothing is more powerful and important for an organization to be successful than communication. There are many tools for a business to choose from, such as Zoom or Slack, but in our professional opinion, Microsoft Teams is the ultimate business collaboration tool. Microsoft Teams isn’t just for meetings, calls, and chats; it’s a powerhouse tool that integrates with other productivity tools, like Word and Excel, allowing users to seamlessly navigate between video calls, chat, document collaboration, and more!

So now that we have you interested, where do you get started with Microsoft Teams?

Testing Out Teams

A great way to get started with Teams is to pilot the platform within an IT department. Doing so enables IT employees to better understand Teams so they can evangelize the platform and help other employees get started.

For example, in a successful pilot program, you might create an “IT Department” group within the platform, which is referred to as a ‘team’. Under that team, you can create several channels dedicated to different IT needs, such as:

• General - led by the IT manager or CIO as a general place to post IT announcements.
• Infrastructure - containing documentation on network infrastructure that IT employees can refer to as needed, along with providing a way for employees to communicate about infrastructure-related needs.
• Cybersecurity - containing documentation of a company’s information security policies, along with providing a secure way for employees to alert one another about vulnerabilities, communicate about cyber awareness initiatives, and more.
• Help Desk - used by IT employees to communicate and collaborate on help desk issues such as open tickets and Wikis.

The same idea can be applied to your other departments like sales, marketing, operations, etc., allowing each group to customize how they organize and collaborate.

Ready for Rollout

As a certified Microsoft partner, we often help businesses with their move to Microsoft Teams. Our strategy is to implement Teams in four phases:

Envisioning and Readiness: We assess your current environment and perform readiness assessments to help you prepare for optimal Teams adoption.

Governance: We can set up rules and permissions in your Teams application that help protect communications and prevent accidental compliance and security errors.

Adoption Planning: We help companies ensure their Teams adoption and deployment go smoothly. This includes planning, configuration, provisioning, employee training, and more.

Implementation: We implement and configure Teams to meet your specific needs, including developing integrations and APIs, creating usability and permission settings, setting up devices, and more.

Ascend Can Help

Microsoft Teams is a powerful piece of the Microsoft 365 stack. In a report by Forrester, it’s estimated that businesses can see an ROI of 163% with successful adoption of Microsoft 365 over the course of 3 years. We’ve experienced the impact of Microsoft 365 and its applications in our own organization as it has been a crucial part of our business operations and growth. Now we’ve helped hundreds of other organizations adopt Microsoft’s applications into their own environments with our Microsoft Migration service.

Want to learn more about how we can help? Reach out for a free consultation.