During the rapid digital transformation for businesses across the globe, SMB’s have proven to be able to adapt quickly and successfully. Remote teams across the board have reported that they’ve grown accustomed to easier collaboration tools and quicker communication methods, thus increasing productivity and efficiency. 2021 will be the year that organizations continue evolving their IT infrastructure and remote work solutions to work smarter, not harder!
Do you feel as if your business is still behind the competition? Not sure if there’s a more innovative solution your team would appreciate? As the preferred Managed IT provider of Illinois and Wisconsin, Computers Nationwide is happy to lead the way! One of our favorite must-have tools for all SMB’s is Microsoft Teams! Microsoft 365 Business Services have been a lifesaver for countless businesses both during the pandemic and for many years prior.
Learn why we recommend using Microsoft Teams to keep your people connected…
Why Microsoft Teams?
Whether you’re working remotely or returning to the workplace, Teams enables you to do your best work from anywhere. Stay connected, productive, and secure as you adapt to new ways of working. Teams is the all-in-one collaboration solution with everything you need to be productive in one place: meetings, calls, chat, familiar Office apps, and business process workflows. It’s where you come together to get work done. Read these tips and tricks for maximizing productivity and collaboration while working remote or in the office!
A few key benefits of using Microsoft Teams:
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Perfect solution for teams of any size, from small to large organizations and everyone in between!
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All of your go-to apps in one place, such as Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.
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The world is your office! Enjoy checking emails, making video calls, and accessing important documents wherever you are – especially from the home office!
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An extremely secure and reliable way to send, store, and exchange information with coworkers and customers alike.
Have you been curious about using Microsoft Teams for years now, but haven’t quite taken the leap? We understand that upgrading your IT infrastructure and improving your daily practices may seem daunting. However, the beauty of switching over to Microsoft 365 Business Services is the seamless transition and ease of use! Plus as your Managed IT partner, Computers Nationwide will be right beside you every step of the way. We promise this transition will be a valuable investment for many years to come.
Need more convincing? Our network affiliates love collaborating with Microsoft Teams to offer the best innovative solutions for businesses everywhere. Learn how our partners are working with Microsoft 365 to offer key components for success – these tools are especially vital for staying digitally connected during COVID-19.
Communication
Broadvoice
“Level up the experience for Teams users with enterprise-grade voice communications. Microsoft Teams can bridge the gaps for remote work. Within Teams, you can chat, conference and work on shared files created with Office 365 apps and more. Add b-hive and also be able to meet all your team’s external calling needs in one platform.
With Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams users can access b-hive calling features natively within the Teams app on any device – desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Keep your business communication in one place even when away from your desk. Leverage the collaboration tools of Microsoft Teams and the call features of b-hive in one easy to use mobile app. Be able to keep in touch with teammates, receive customer calls and more while on the go. Calls and conversations will be logged and tracked in your desktop application for one seamless experience.
Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams enables your customers to:
- Unify their collaboration, messaging and voice services on the Teams platform
- Access advanced PBX calling features, such as auto attendant and call routing
- Leverage call center features, such as hunt groups and CRM integration
- Improve productivity by simplifying the workspace interface”
8×8
“Why 8×8 for Microsoft Teams? A single cloud platform with advanced telephony and contact center capabilities for Microsoft Teams. Hundreds of organizations with tens of thousand of users globally rely on 8×8 for advanced communications for Teams. Microsoft Teams is the primary collaboration hub for employees in organizations around the world. Teams users can make and receive global calls right from the native Teams dialer thanks to direct routing with 8×8.
Call connectivity—and quality—shouldn’t stop at the border. 8×8 provides crystal-clear calls with phone numbers in 120+ countries, unlimited calling plans in 47 countries, and full PSTN replacement in 42 countries. 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams also integrates seamlessly into popular business apps and CRM tools like Salesforce.
Train your Teams users? You probably don’t even have to tell them. Between Teams and the other business apps, they can keep their current workflow without switching apps as CRM records get automatically updated. Your contact center agents shouldn’t have to learn a separate communications tool. The Microsoft Teams-certified 8×8 cloud contact center routes calls directly to Teams-powered support staff, improving customer service and supporting omnichannel interactions, call recording and more.”
Backups
Barracuda
“We’re excited to introduce the latest version of Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup with a new platform that provides cost-effective, scalable backup and recovery for all your Microsoft Office 365 data, including Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Microsoft recommends that you use third-party backup for your Office 365 data. Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup offers fast backups, highly granular restore capabilities, and unmatched ease of use.
It’s fast and easy to find and recover data with newly redesigned user interface that is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. Fast search and filter options make restoring data back to your organization as easy as possible. And you can go from sign-up to running your first backup in 5 minutes.
Comprehensive, transparent reporting of backup status, health monitoring, and storage statistics provides total real-time visibility across your data-protection infrastructure, while the audit log and email alerts keep you informed about the details of every action.”
Veeam
“Together, Microsoft and Veeam go beyond typical backup and recovery scenarios. We make sure data is always available, protected and actively working for our customers’ businesses. Regardless of where your data resides – on-premises, Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack or Microsoft Office 365, we make sure it’s available when and where you need it!
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is Veeam’s backup solution for Microsoft SaaS applications, including SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive for Business. In this software, Veeam can back up Microsoft 365 data to secure locations both on-prem and various object storages. This backup allows for a secondary level of protection with a separation of privileges so that one set of compromised credentials does not break the defense.
Veeam also backs up all permissions and settings from the gathered data, allowing for a smooth restoration to the original locations. Restores offer the flexibility to restore one or as many user’s data at once to the original location, making it a breeze to restore an entire organization in just a few clicks, if necessary. The restore types also expand to restore to new locations, exporting the data, and emailing the data directly to an end user.
Each application backed up has a restore explorer tailored to the application data. Integrated into each explorer is an advanced search that can search across an entire organization’s backup to granularly return results. This search can make it easy to find a file and perform an eDiscovery-like operation. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 makes it simple to recover Microsoft 365 data in any situation.”
Security
TPX Communications
“Microsoft has long been the leader in business productivity, with the Microsoft Office Suite being used by businesses large and small all over the world. Now with Office 365, Microsoft provides the most complete and secure cloud productivity platform that removes the barriers of how and where people get work done.
The MSx Managed Office 365 service from TPx complements Microsoft Office 365 perfectly by employing Microsoft Certified Solutions Experts (MCSEs) to move you into the Office 365 Cloud and manage the environment to ensure your Office 365 instance remains secure, available, and performing optimally. Leveraging our proven migration process, your organization will benefit from a smooth and efficient transition to the Microsoft Office 365 platform.
- Enjoy improved productivity: TPx will configure your Office 365 environment according to our recommended practices. This ensures that it is built right and that you maximize your ability to leverage this powerful platform to improve employee productivity.
- Experience enhanced security: Office 365 contains many built-in security enhancements and tools. TPx will configure and manage these per recommended practices and individual customer requirements.
- Feel confident with disaster recovery: MSx Managed Office 365 includes our complete data protection and recovery solution. This solution securely backs up all email, OneDrive and SharePoint data in Office 365 to a separate Azure instance, which enhances your ability to find and quickly recover important data that may have been accidentally or maliciously deleted.”
Even Microsoft shares the story of how they acclimated their employees to remote work when the pandemic began – and how Microsoft Teams saved the day! Read their article Best of Showcase: How Microsoft embraced working remotely internally in 2020…
“When it became clear that employees would need to shift to working from home because of COVID-19, Microsoft pivoted quickly, taking steps to make sure the transition would be smooth for its 166,000 employees. The team leading the charge was Microsoft Core Services Engineering and Operations (CSEO), the engineering organization at Microsoft that builds and manages the products, processes, and services that the company runs on.
The work that CSEO engineering teams did to make sure the company was ready for working from home included optimizing its network and VPN, ensuring its Zero Trust security system was ready for prime time, and making sure Microsoft Teams and other productivity tools were ready to help employees work from home with ease.
There are lots of tips and tricks that we use to help employees get more out of working on Teams. There’s a lot that they can do to stay effective when they need to work remotely. – Sarah Lundy, a business program manager at Microsoft
Staying connected with Microsoft Teams
The team that deploys Microsoft Teams internally at Microsoft knew the platform would get a surge of usage once everyone started working from home. The goal was to make sure employees didn’t feel like they were losing anything when they moved away from working in their offices, something CSEO did with a very proactive approach to communicating all the things they could do with Microsoft Teams.
“There are lots of trips and tricks that we use to help employees get more out of working on Teams,” says Sarah Lundy, a business program manager in CSEO. “There’s a lot that they can do to stay effective when they need to work remotely.”
Keeping your network secure
If you’ve already moved most of your employees work to the cloud, your network will be fine if they all suddenly start working from home.
That’s what Microsoft learned when COVID-19 caused the company to shift to working remotely. Thanks to the Microsoft’s Zero Trust initiative, the company had already begun using a split tunneling approach to move employee workload from the company’s virtual private network (VPN) to the cloud.
“Adopting split tunneling has ensured that Microsoft employees can access core applications over the internet using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365,” says Steve Means, a senior service engineer in CSEO. “This takes pressure off the VPN and gives employees more bandwidth to do their job securely.”
