Microsoft Teams’ extraordinary growth phase during the pandemic is continuing in the post-pandemic work, currently boasting 145 million daily users.

That growth pattern is set to continue as more companies recognise the importance of cloud tools. Microsoft 365 has a central role to play in the future of the digital workplace.

However, many of these users only use the most basic functions within Microsoft Teams’ video calling capability, lacking an understanding of the other tools offered within Microsoft Teams that they can use to enhance their communication and boost their productivity.

Meeting Scheduling

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The clearest way that Microsoft Teams users could improve their organisational capacities would be to leverage its built-in integration with the Microsoft Exchange scheduler.

By using Microsoft Exchange within the Teams app, users can link with the other attendees’ calendars and immediately understand if they are available at that time. This improves organisation by ending the need to endlessly email back and forth to find a time that works for everyone.

Microsoft Shifts

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Microsoft Shifts is another great way to manage your employee’s time from within Microsoft Teams. Shifts is a great way to organise your staff’s shift patterns, displaying clearly when certain team members are working and not working. This is hugely beneficial for communications as it will allow workers to see if their colleagues are active before attempting to contact them.

Dynamics 365 Integration

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Microsoft Teams can also be integrated with Dynamics 365, a suite of decision-making applications that can help you to engage with customers and collaborate. Integration means that your staff will be able to make Team calls from within the Dynamics setting, making it much easier to work together on documents in call and engage with customers in real-time.

Microsoft Stream

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Microsoft Teams is not only good for meetings; you can also use it to enhance messaging across the whole company. Stream is an excellent pathway to humanised communications that all CEOs that leverage Teams should be using.

Microsoft Stream allows your business to hold live and on-demand events for up to 10,000 attendees, helping you broadcast your business’ progress to everyone in a digestible way.

Stream is also an excellent way for your business to create consistent training programs by generating streamable content that staff can utilise to do their job better.

Third-Party Integration

With Microsoft Teams, you are not only limited to other Microsoft apps when exploring integrations. Since 2020, Microsoft has welcomed developers to integrate with Teams, and Asana, Trello, and many others have taken up the offer.

It is worth investigating whether the business applications you use have plans to or are already integrated with Teams so you can better utilise them while making Teams calls.

Optimising Teams Usage

These five mentioned tools are just a drop in the ocean of that which Teams offers to its customers. It is recommended that you take the time to familiarise yourself with all of the Teams integrations and tools so that your business can use it in the best way possible.