Bring people together, digitally
As COVID-19 continues to change the business landscape, SMBs need a powerful tool to enable communication and collaboration between remote teams.
Small and medium-sized businesses are facing unprecedented challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic. And for those with newly remote workforces, effective teamwork can be one of the biggest issues. After all, how do you work together if you can’t be together in the same location? How do you collaborate from afar when you’re accustomed to in-person meetings and group-level planning sessions? How do you communicate quickly and effectively when face-to-face conversations are no longer possible? Microsoft’s answer is Teams.
Teams is Microsoft’s communication and collaboration hub within Office 365. It’s an integrated software solution that allows people to chat, collaborate, and meet – virtually – whenever they like, from wherever they are.
For the past three years, Microsoft Teams has empowered SMBs locally and globally. Today, more than 40 million people are active on Teams every day, using the secure platform (web and mobile) to carry out essential business tasks and to maintain contact with remote workers, colleagues, managers, customers, and service partners.
Microsoft favourites like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are built into Teams to create a comprehensive shared workspace where it’s as easy to share files as it is to share ideas. Powerful communication tools are integrated as well, to enable one-on-one conversations, group discussions, and online meetings. With Teams, remote workers can:
- chat from anywhere via threaded and persistent messaging with rich text and @mention capabilities and customised notifications;
- collaborate from anywhere by co-authoring documents in real time and tracking project chats, notes, updates, and files in one place;
- meet from anywhere by using high-definition audio, web and video conferencing facilities that support presentation and application sharing.
Microsoft has made the free version of Teams available to everyone in response to the current coronavirus crisis. There’s also a way to explore the benefits of premium Teams even if you don’t have Office 365.
Free Teams. The no-cost version of Teams gives you unlimited chat, built-in group, one-on-one audio or video calling, 10 GB of team file storage, and 2 GB of personal file storage per user. Explore the differences between free and paid plans here.
Teams via the Office 365 E1 Trial. In early March 2020, Microsoft announced a free six-month Office 365 E1 Trial, including Teams, because of the increased need for people to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact us to learn more about this special offer.
Teams via your existing Office 365 licence. Microsoft Teams is part of Office 365. If your organisation is correctly licensed for Office 365, then you already have access to Teams. Talk to your IT staff (or your BUI account manager) about activating Teams if you haven’t already done so. And share the in-depth resources below to help your people maximise Microsoft Teams while they’re working remotely during South Africa’s national lockdown.
