Our company, like many other business teams, often participates in business projects which require globally dispersed customer, partner, supplier and team staff to collaborate seamlessly, using a shared digital online workspace. Traditionally, such workspaces like WebEx, Zoom, and Skype would offer you some basic text chat, audio and video conferencing capabilities, as well as some basic screen sharing functionality.

Meanwhile, the rise of cloud software solutions like Slack and Microsoft Teams has resulted in the confluence of formerly separate business software capabilities into unified communication, productivity, and business process management platforms. Today, these platforms are becoming key success factors for businesses of all sizes to evolve into “virtual organisations” and develop the level of flexibility and resilience needed to respond to business challenges like the current coronavirus pandemic and the resulting “working from home” mandate.

Great examples for such enhanced platform maturity and capabilities are Active Directory (SSO) support for secure user and guest access management, as well as corporate email, calendar, task, and project management integration and, of course, online and desktop apps for the collaborative creation, editing and annotation of text documents, spreadsheets, and presentation slides.

Lastly, solutions like Microsoft Teams now can offer connectors to embed popular business applications like sales, customer service, marketing automation, business analytics, as well as custom-built low-code / no-code apps into the unified communication and collaboration platform, effectively turning it into a “one-stop shop” for many software users within a single team and across multiple business organisations.

It is this recent evolution, which causes businesses to now look beyond basic online meeting and screen-sharing tools, and instead opting for a seamless online communication platform like Microsoft Teams, which many businesses already are entitled to use at no extra cost thanks to their already existing Microsoft Office 365 subscription plan.

With software licenses readily available, it remains a challenge for businesses to plan and execute the implementation, user training and go-live support of their new collaboration platform. This is, where our team here at Vepro can help your business to quickly and efficiently explore, plan and deliver the following solution scope options:

• Basic online communication: use Microsoft Teams for your team’s text, audio, and video chat requirements, including screen-sharing, session recording, secure internal and guest user access management. Required software licenses: Microsoft Teams
• Basic online communication and productivity: as above, plus file sharing and MS Office document collaboration, wikis, interactive online forms, and Sharepoint document libraries. Required software licenses: Microsoft Teams, Office Online, Forms, Sharepoint
• Advanced online communication and productivity: as above, plus Kanban boards for task and project management, appointment bookings, request and approval workflows, chat bots, embedded performance reporting and analytics. Additionally required software licenses: Planner, Bookings, Power Flow, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI
• Advanced online communication, productivity and business processes: as above, plus business app integration (sales, customer service, marketing automation) and/or custom business process flow and/or custom business app development. Additionally required software licenses: Power Apps. Optional integrations: Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Zendesk, Mailchimp, Jira, Trello, Asana, and many more.

 Learn more about how to empower your team’s remote collaboration in line with your organisation’s data security and IT governance requirements. Contact us to schedule a free introduction online meeting!