Interlink Cloud Blog

Managing Microsoft Teams enables your organization to optimize productive collaboration but requires thoughtful planning to do it well. Read on to consider what’s best for your organization!
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Overview of Teams

Microsoft Teams is a powerful platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. Teams integrates with your Office 365 subscription productivity suite and feature extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products as well. It provides a place for your team to collaborate on projects through unified communication, which increases business effectiveness.

Six Questions Your Organization Should Be Asking

Interlink has put together these six questions we believe all organizations should be asking themselves to ensure they are managing Teams well and have established appropriate security through governance and compliance.

1. What data retention policies for Teams is best for your environment and industry?
2. Who is allowed to create a Team? Should they all have those permissions?
3. Should you archive or expire unused Teams?
4. Do you know which of your Teams are public or private?
5. Are you licensed correctly to fully utilize Data Loss Protection in Teams?
6. Do you need to protect Teams from containing protected words or profanity in their names?

Microsoft Dataverse delivers a built-in low code data platform for Microsoft Teams...

and provides relational data storage, rich data types, enterprise-grade governance, and one-click solution deployment.
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What is Microsoft Dataverse?

Dataverse (formerly named the Common Data Service, Project Oakdale, or Dataflex) is a lightweight database built into the Power Platform that is easy to use and maintain. Dataverse lets organizations securely store and manage data that is used by specific business applications. Stored in the Cloud, your organization receives a basic set of tables covering many typical scenarios, but you can also create custom tables specific to your organization or industry and populate them with data by using Power Query (commonly used across Excel and Power BI). App makers in your organization can then use Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents to build applications that use this data – bringing rich metadata to drive business processes while ensuring data quality. Reduce the stress of data management and let Dataverse determine your storage needs for relational data. This integration with the Power Platform also improves insights with the built-in AI. Enhance your data analysis and process data more quickly through turnkey integration with Power BI.

The year 2021 promises to be a new reality in many ways, not the least of which is the continuing transition to a remote workforce. Businesses and employees are coming to appreciate the benefits of a work-from-home environment and are unlikely to return to the traditional five-day-a-week-in-the-office work model.

Employees enjoy the flexibility of working from home and not having to face long commutes to and from the office. Remote working also saves an employee an average of $4,000 annually in commuting costs, coffee, and lunch expense, and maintaining a closet full of professional work attire according to one report.¹

Creating an effective environment for collaboration and productivity is crucial to your organization’s success but building the infrastructure to support effective teamwork can be challenging. Microsoft Teams is one of the most powerful collaborative suite of tools available today. Teams brings together several tools and communication methods to provide an ideal hub for collaboration. But Teams can be even more effective when combined with other available applications and solutions.

Interlink and Microsoft are unlocking the full potential of Teams with their Energize Teams Apps and Solutions Workshop - an offering that tailors solutions specifically for your organization. Teams Apps and Solutions extend the benefits of Teams even further by automating your business processes and improving productivity through utilizing applications from the 700+ apps available for Teams, along with integrating with custom low-code solutions.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the phone call in business has been greatly exaggerated. According to one recent survey, 66 percent of millennials are likely to contact a company by phone and 93 percent of respondents said inbound phone sales have a significant impact on their bottom line.[1]

It’s not just external communications that still rely on phone calls. Effective internal communications can result in lower absenteeism, less turnover, and higher productivity, according to a Gallup survey.[2]