How Teams and Microsoft 365 are underpinning communication in a changing world

How Teams and Microsoft 365 are underpinning communication in a changing world

Ahead of his session at our Digital Revolution³ on-demand virtual event, Jason Wynn, our Principal Technology Strategist and a Microsoft MVP, explains what role Teams and Microsoft 365 – as well as integrated technologies will play in helping organisations adapt to the demands and opportunities of today’s operating landscape. 

Content+Cloud has for many years been working closely with Microsoft on how we can guide organisations on their digital transformation. However, the evolution of information technology dictates that we now need to go beyond this.   

Today, we’re increasingly talking about delivering on the digital imperative for each of our customers. Our customers span all industries and sectors and will need to infuse technology into their business processes and functions to enable them to do more with less. We’re working with them to help them get the most from their technologies, allowing them to build resilience, meet changing expectations and improve experiences. The time is truly now to make a difference between thriving and being left behind.   

Doing more with less, however, doesn’t mean stretching your people to breaking point. It’s in fact about giving them the tools they need to communicate, collaborate and be their best in the modern workplace.  

Content+Cloud can help you overcome today’s challenges and emerge stronger. No other partner provides the breadth and depth with the best-in-class products, and best-in-class suite solutions across Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365. We believe Microsoft Teams is the ideal solution for integrated, extensible communications and collaboration in a fluid and changing world of work. Here are just a few of the reasons why. 

 

Microsoft Teams: a catalyst for innovation 

Utilising Microsoft Teams is the catalyst for making seamless work and collaboration occur. It helps ensure there are no disruptions to any work-related activity where the needs go beyond just voice and extend to video – creating worksheets, sharing documents and so on. This has spawned innovations of its own, with collaboration being key. Content+Cloud can interweave all of the capabilities in Microsoft and third-party apps to create innovative, productivity-enhancing solutions.   

Jeff Taper, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, described this vision of Teams as the “flywheel of innovation that starts to spin and quickly gains momentum”.  At Content+Cloud, we’ve seen the pace of innovation accelerating with the solutions we’ve built for our customers to use in Teams, providing a broad canvas for us to build upon bots, cards, apps in meetings, apps in chats and channels, and message extensions.  

 

Changing the way we work with Teams and Microsoft 365 – and beyond 

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is its ability as a platform to continuously grow, adding new capabilities on what seems to be a weekly basis.   

As our customers work to find new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams in their business processes, Content+Cloud assists our customers with customised workflows, business process automation and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience.  

Empowering frontline workers  

Microsoft Teams is the perfect solution for organisations seeking greater connections in hybrid and dispersed environments. One example of its capabilities is Update, a Teams app you can provide to business teams who need to request regular information from employees – in particular, frontline workers, such as:  

  • operations teams at a retail company;  
  • auditing functions in hospitality;  
  • area managers from a clothes retailer. 

 For teams and individuals like these, Update takes all of the effort of communication and collaboration, cutting duplication and streamlining workflows. The task publishing feature allows for a central and delegated push of tasks to teams with reporting on progress. You can create a single task once and publish it separately for each site. And as you can use it on desktop, web and mobile, you can get notifications on tasks even when on the move. 

Update works equally well with a store manager’s own ad-hoc tasks, an area manager’s tasks and centrally managed and published tasks. it allows everybody from support teams to store employees to collaborate on checklists, images, comments, progress reporting, task assignments and completion 

Phones and meetings in the hybrid world of work 

Communication in Microsoft Teams has quickly gone beyond being a chat and video-calling tool to become a leading telephony option offering unparalleled integration.  

At Content+Cloud we’ve been working diligently to provide Direct Routing and Microsoft Calling plans to our users.  We work with organisations to provide the best-in-class telephone solutions to our customers ensuring we meet business and technical objectives whilst keeping things simple for the end user.  By keeping things simple we drive adoption, efficiency, and resilience of the overall calling solutions.   

At the same time, Teams has been the spur for ever-more powerful experiences for people meeting in the hybrid world. Microsoft Meetings has evolved with the release of key new technologies that help enrich our experience. These include: 

  • Mesh avatars for Microsoft Teams, which offer flexibility and choice in how we show up to our Teams meetings with animated versions of ourselves; 
  • Excel Live, which is similar to PowerPoint live, but allows us to interact and edit a single Excel file inside the meeting itself; 
  • Cameo inside PowerPoint Live, which helps presenters seamlessly integrate their Teams camera feed into their presentation;   
  • IntelliFrame, which enables in-room participants to have a place in the video gallery. IntelliFrame enhances the focus and framing of people inside a meeting room so attendees can see them as their own individual frames in the gallery. This solution should be rolled out to standard camera types in the first quarter of 2023. 

Seamless customer and agent experiences with Digital Contact Center  

As the telephony capabilities have matured, and the possibilities of integration with tools such as ERP and CRM have been realised, Microsoft has delved into the world of contact centres.   

With the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, Content+Cloud assists our customers across voice, video, and other digital engagement channels by pulling together the best of Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform and Nuance.    

Working with Microsoft, Content+Cloud can bring together a comprehensive contact centre that provides you with best-in-class AI that powers self-service experience, live customer engagements, collaborative agent experience, advanced telephone services, and fraud prevention capabilities.  

Sign up for more insights at our Digital Revolution³ on-demand virtual event

At Digital Revolution³ we examine in detail what the digital imperative means for you, for us, and for the global workforce as a whole. Jason, alongside his fellow Microsoft MVP and our Field Chief Technology Officer Steve Goodman, will be taking a deeper look at how you can achieve fluid, unified communications and collaboration with Teams, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365.

Register now

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