How long you do you think you spend, every week, looking for a specific message within a specific email thread, within an already muddled inbox? No matter how much housekeeping we do with our email accounts, and how often we try to program messages to land in a specific folder, managing a single email address can be a part-time job all on its own.
In part, this is why many businesses now prefer the likes of Microsoft Teams and Yammer for all real-time communication and collaboration. Naturally, at AddIn365, we’re more partial to Teams, but here’s why we genuinely think it’s a better option for you:
Discussions Become Much Simpler
Every email inbox and subfolder can come to represent a different project, client, conversation and more. When each inbox and subfolder is often already divided between internal and external priorities, it’s understandable that conversation threads can become disjointed – not just for you, but for other team members, too. That’s a whole lot of confusion.
Teams won’t help to reduce your workload, but it does combine everything you’d expect from an email account and a project management tool into one – making both essential platforms much simpler to manage.
Teams Channels makes creating a team and organising the work you do far simpler, combining a chat tool, file sharing platform and task assigning into the same place – meaning far less hunting down threads and messages in-between tasks.
No More Hunting For Lost Documents
One of the biggest bugbears about emails is that you know you’ve previously seen every document you can’t find. It’s there, right in front of you – but, no matter how many times you scroll through your inbox, it just won’t reveal itself. This is not your email provider’s fault; it’s actually doing exactly what it’s programmed to – but that’s usually not the way you want it to work as needs and priorities change.
With Team channel files, every document you attach to a post is copied into a folder that every team member can see. Teams brings everything together in one place, showing you what you’ve read, modified or uploaded yourself or who the document originally belonged to. So, no more spending ages looking for a PPT that you know for sure Mr X sent to you and Mrs Y only a few days ago, that is now buried beneath a lengthy thread of responses.
Now, it’s simply in the folder that you and everyone you’re working with on this particular project expect it to be in. Plus, this will be the case for every project you’re working on at any given time. Your files will make sense, your conversations will be efficiently archived, and everything you’ve been tagged into will be clear to see (and, crucially, find).
No Added Pressure To Always Be Available
One fear some people have about switching to Teams, or Yammer, is that it won’t work unless everything occurs in real-time. Like other collaborations tools, including Skype for Business, Teams can work this way – but only if that’s how you want it to work. In fact, one of the biggest benefits of emails is that you don’t necessarily have to respond to them right away – but Teams is also just as patient as you need it to be.
Within each team, there will be people who respond in their own time, and others who like to devour each message as it arrives – and Teams doesn’t favour either style of working. Whenever you do join a conversation, it won’t begin a new thread that’s unique to you, and you’ll quickly be able to catch up, in your own time, on what’s been said before. This goes for you and every member of the team you’ve assigned.
However, will it ever replace email entirely? This comes down to the individual and individual businesses. To discuss more benefits of Microsoft Teams for you and the way you want to work, contact us today.
