The COVID-19 outbreak has been an exceptional equaliser for all businesses and Microsoft Teams is catalyzing that change with empowered APIs. Organisations with digital readiness / digital-first approach are the ones that have been able to do business-as-usual, in these troubling times.

Sandy Shen, from Gartner has rightly stated "The value of digital channels, products and operations is immediately obvious to companies everywhere right now. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now, and over the long term."-

The most common challenge for organizations has been business continuity & quick, easy & effective collaboration among remote workforce has been the key driving factor to overcome the challenge - to which Microsoft Teams was the most obvious solution.

The new normal has put the debate over Teams adoption to rest, owing to its ability to act as the central hub of collaboration for employees and stakeholders across the globe resulting into not only restoring usual business operations, but also, increasing productivity & time-to-decision by manifolds.

1. Replacement of Skype For Business?

Teams is an improvised form of Skype for Business with highly empowered API integration capabilities. The architecture of Teams is running on top of 'Skype for business' as a service. Skype is mostly used for your chats and calls purposes whereas, Teams is more for collaboration and meetings with additional features of skype. Teams is placed as larger, more powerful, faster, more intuitive platform, based on much more robust privacy, compliance, and governance rules which is ideal for organizations of any size.

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"Teams is inclusive and open, designed for a world in which five generations of workers are teaming up to work together and as much as 80% of an individual's time is spent engaging in some form of collaboration. It's also designed for a fluid, modern workplace in which more than 70% of workers will, by 2020, be working remotely." -Microsoft

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2. An organizational approach to adoption

Teams adoption has brought a shift in the traditional ways of working to more inclusive & collaborative culture across the globe, where employees are more vocal about their ideas & opinion bringing agility & innovation in the system.

"Teams improved decision making by >17% as workers could more quickly make contact and communicate with fellow employees and review all the information, they need to make decisions more efficiently. Collaboration processes have been standardized, which speeds up decisions" -states a Forrester survey on MS Teams Adoption

Teams has opened new streams providing organizations with tailor-made solutions pertaining to updates, data and information as well as timely content. Microsoft with its data-driven listening strategy is enabling quick identification of issues and is building upon successful efforts - to eliminate and reduce errors and bugs. Training and associated campaigns are being run by Microsoft to ensure deeper penetration of Microsoft Teams. Microsoft's power BI dashboard enables it to capture critical insights and monitor any delinquency- along with the user surveys.

3. Key steps for effective Teams Adoption

Once you are up with Microsoft Teams, the next step would be to ensure that you take right steps for Teams implementation that justifies the end goals:

• Effective and seamless collaboration guidelines
• Well designed and articulated governance rules
• Building champions network
• Creation of a well-structured adoption program
• Developing collaterals and activities to build awareness
• Creating a more visible and active sponsor coalition
• Focus towards increasing engagement
• Minimal yet effective API integrations
• Finally, Nurture a culture of collaboration
  
  

Microsoft Teams Adoption - Final Note

Sharing ideas, communicating and collaborating on projects, training and feedback have all been made seamlessly possible with one centralized tool - Microsoft Teams! Teams is not just the new age messaging service and it is the way of working in the new normal!

Teams transcends the boundaries of text, voice or video capabilities by allowing for multiple API integrations (say tools like Power BI, Trello, Google Drive) and productivity tools (including Office 365 suite) within Teams interface itself. No hassles, no complexity and more importantly no more confusion for a mess load of disaggregated applications.

Are you enabled to operate your business remotely or still thinking on how to increase collaboration & productivity for workforce who are operating remotely? Global partnerships with over 20 leading brands such as Microsoft, Kofax, Quadient, Sitecore, Messagepoint, and others - enables Espire to be your one-stop destination for business on the go, thereby redefining customer experience with quick business gains.