Microsoft Teams: Remote Work Made Productive & Smooth

21 Apr 2020

Microsoft Teams Work From Home: How can you utilize the best of this platform to remain agile and productive in this crazy time?

The year 2020 is all about social distancing, lockdowns, and work-from-home due to the COVID-19 outbreak which has thrown all of us into what everybody is calling ‘the new normal’. But the former 2 of these 3 things will not last long while the latter – ‘remote work (Work-From-Home)’ is here to stay.

Companies, small to large, across different industries have migrated their employees to the new remote-work environment with agnostic locations and this has constructed a massive market for Chat, Meetings, Callings, and Collaboration tools as they have become a necessity to keep businesses running, employees safe, and productivity unaffected.

One such productive modern group collaboration platform that has seen a massive spike in its usage is Microsoft Teams. In early March 2020, driven by the coronavirus pandemic, MS Teams witnessed a 500% spike as more and more companies began to embrace wfh and the number of daily active users of the software jumped from 32 Million to 44 Million (and counting).

Now, let’s see how Microsoft Teams assists remote work / work-from-home:

Getting on-board Microsoft Teams:

As Covid-19 spread across the world, Microsoft made Microsoft Teams available to everyone by providing many of its premium features at zero cost. Organizations with a Microsoft Office 365 Subscription have access to MS Teams already but what if you’re a newbie? You can download a freemium version of Microsoft Teams or can move to Office with us.

Microsoft Teams Features: Extending Support to Remote Employees

Microsoft Teams has amazing group collaboration features along with enormous cloud storage. To extend support to remote workers and assist them in staying productive while working from home, Microsoft offers the below package:

1. Unlimited chat
2. One-on-one audio, video calling
3. Group audio & video calling
4. 10 GB Team file storage
5. 2 GB of Personal file storage
6. Real-time collaboration with Office apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote

How to Get Microsoft Teams for Free?

From March 2020, Microsoft is offering a free trial of Office 365 E1 package with Microsoft Teams included due to the increased need for work-from-home. You can either contact a Microsoft Account Representative or connect with a Microsoft Partner to get a free Microsoft Teams trial. Get Microsoft Teams for free and learn how highly secure the tool is compared to other popular collaboration tools.

Microsoft Team Features & Capabilities to Support Work-From-Home:

• Unlimited messaging
• Resource sharing
• Create Groups for relevant tasks, documents and communication
• Calling on desktops and mobile phones
• Virtual meetings
• Video conferencing
• High security to both internal and external devices

Fun feature:

You can turn yourself into a potato in a Microsoft Teams video conference. Learn how to be a potato, I mean, how to look like a potato.

Apps for Microsoft Teams Work From Home

Microsoft shares a number of apps that can be used with Microsoft Teams to help employees remain agile and highly productive in the remote work environment. The several available applications support real-time feedback and surveys, standups, whiteboarding, employee recognition, and more.

Microsoft Teams’ New Features to support Remote Work:

With extraordinary features already present such as Background blur, meeting scheduling and recording, Microsoft Teams is planning to roll out the below features by late 2020 for highly effective team collaboration:

1. Enhanced audio experience
2. ‘Raise hand’ feature – Released
3. Background noise suppression feature
4. Pop-out chats into a separate window feature

It is during a crisis like this that we realize how beneficial modern workplace solutions and productivity tools, like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, are for a business’ continuity and employee productivity.

If you want to adopt Microsoft Teams, a Microsoft Partner and Service Provider like us, is ready to lead you out of the challenges of remote work your business and employees might be facing. Get in touch with us for Microsoft Teams consulting or if you’d like to migrate to Office 365, our consultants are here to help.