By Klyde Manansala
IN OUR world of work, why do we need to build super teams?
As the access to mobile devices has increased the ability of professionals to work from anywhere at anytime, Microsoft once again stepped up its game as it unveiled the Microsoft Teams—a “chat-based workspace” for Office 365.
Microsoft noticed that employees who come to businesses today are mostly millennials, who prefer using digital tools and smart devices.
Even those who had been in the industry for years are continuously upgrading their way of finishing their work in a digital workplace, so Microsoft introduced the most comprehensive productivity solution in the market today, Microsoft Teams, the newest piece added to Office 365.
“It’s good to see that leaders of various enterprise organizations here in the Philippines recognize the need for digital transformation. And we’re very happy to share that Microsoft just launched Microsoft Teams,” Christian Lim, the Country Business Group Lead of Microsoft PH, said.
Similar to what corporate technology workers are experiencing to messaging chats today, Teams is also capable of threaded chats.
But, it has its own uniqueness. Microsoft has added more than 100 new features for Teams including the option for public teams, scheduled meetings, and mobile voice calling. It can accommodate up to 600 users in a single team and the application has also added stickers, giphy support and other features such as memes to appeal to millennial users.
“It’s not just messaging, you can actually work together inside teams. You can customize it. You can personalize channels, you can personalize memes. It’s grounded on our security platform today,” Lim said.
Teams is also integrated with the users’ outlook or e-mail. People can easily switch and send a mail as well. And since Teams is part of Office 365, users can open and work on documents such as Excel, Word, Powerpoint in Teams itself.
“The idea is that, we’re actually asking people to reduce their email use. You just stay in Teams and you’ll be able to work documents there, communicate with one another fast, schedule meetings, just by using Teams without moving to any other applications,” Lim said. “Collaboration is really the way to move forward for an organization. It’s supposed to make them more efficient, to maximize the use and time of their employees.”
Teams was made generally made available to all Office 365 globally last March and is now available in 180 countries today. It is localized as well in 19 languages.