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The Business Case for Teamwork Solutions

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CollaborationHow our teams work, and our businesses run, continues to evolve. Teamwork — communication and collaboration — brings people together to share information, work together, and accomplish common goals and objectives. When you have a place to create and make decisions, you empower your team to achieve.

Market Dynamics

Finding secure, easy ways to connect across teams and locations is a high priority if you want to create a competitive advantage in today’s quickly changing business landscape.

83% of knowledge workers depend on technology to work together

72% of workers will work remotely, full or part time

35% of knowledge workers still collaborate on documents using email

 

Cloud Forward teamwork solutions enable you to customize your workspace, keep your team secure, and communicate more effectively.

Challenges You Face

Most businesses see the value of Cloud Forward solutions, but migrating to the cloud does not ensure results. Real value requires changing some of the ways you work, leveraging features, and enhancing individual and team productivity and effectiveness.

Communications: How can you bring teams and resources together?

  • Enable real-time communication
  • Provide secure mobile access
  • Empower teams to work remotely

Mobility: How can you enable employees to work from virtually anywhere, on any device?

  • Enhance mobility within your company
  • Reduce overhead, and save money on office space, as employees work remotely

Secure Sharing: How can you make it easier to connect with customers, co-workers, and others?

  • Secure and preserve company data when sharing information with others
  • Distinguish between the information external users can and cannot access
  • Keep track of who has what information

Solutions that Drive Success

Adopting Microsoft 365 means more than migrating emails and files. Adopting Microsoft 365 involves managing change; educating your team on ways to use the teamwork technology to:

Get more done

Teamwork technology embedded in Microsoft 365 enables productivity solutions that:

  • Streamline teamwork
    Integrate team chats, meetings, and files in one place; increase productivity
  • Enable real-time teamwork
    Make it easy for teams to work together on documents; rapidly advance ideas and innovation
  • Connect applications
    Provide the tools and services customers use every day to collaborate; connect people, information, and ideas

Work better together

Microsoft Teamwork solutions enables collaboration solutions that help you:

  • Improve security
    Strengthen your overall security posture and improve compliance and reduce your use of unsecure apps
  • Work from virtually anywhere
    Use digital tools to empower teamwork across your mobile workforce, no matter where your people work or what devices they use

Build your business

Microsoft 365 makes it easier to set up and manage users, devices, and data within a highly secure, cloud-based productivity platform.

  • Use an integrated solution
    Save time, money, and the headache of managing multiple vendors and technologies for security and team solutions
  • Reduce costs
    Microsoft technology provides a nearly 80% cost savings over similar technologies provided by third-party vendors

Partner for Success

We understand that change is challenging. We also see that the results outweigh the effort when teams embrace and adopt new capabilities and improve how they work.  Empowering your team enables success.  Through our Managed Cloud Services, we co-manage your IT services and provide on-going education and support to help your team adopt and leverage new capabilities.  We help your employees succeed at their jobs; we enable your company to achieve your desired results.

Contact us or email us to learn more. Or, schedule a complimentary Cloud Advisor Session and discuss your goals, challenges, and opportunities.

Partnering for G Suite Productivity with Our Top 9 Tips

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G Suite productivity tipsGoogle Workspace (formerly G Suite) is more than an email, calendar, and simple file sharing service.  G Suite is a productivity suite that serves as a platform for a range of tools that helps your team, and your business, work more effectively. It is a cloud-based productivity suite developed by Google that includes a range of productivity tools and applications such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and more. See how you can maximize your business efficiency with our top nine G suite productivity tips and tricks below.

9 ways your team can be more productive with Google Workspace (G Suite):

  1. Share Files, Not Copies:
    Stop sending attachments. Stop wasting time figuring out if the copy of the file in your inbox, on your local drive, or on a shared folder is the most current. Whether you use Google Docs for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations or you continuing using Microsoft Office 365, Google Drive and Team Drives serves your files rather than just sharing them.  People share via link, so all comments, suggestions, and edits are made within a single copy of the file. Versioning keeps this orderly and gives you the ability to look back and compare.
  2. Serve Files, Not File Servers:
    Use Team Drives and Drive File Stream to provide users with “explorer” access to files from Macs, PCs, and local software. Store files under central ownership and managed permissions; avoid performance and capacity problems with unlimited storage. Allow team members to work remotely and securely on computers, tablets, and mobile devices without VPNs and remote desktop services slowing things down.
  3. Communicate, Don’t Just Text:
    Most laptops now have microphones, speakers, and Bluetooth features similar to your smartphones and tablets. Have face to face conversations using Hangouts Meet instead of long email threads, phone tag, or text messaging. Communication is 55% non-verbal. Let your employees see and hear each other, your vendors, and your customers. You can share screens to live document reviews and discussions. Why pay extra for a conferencing service?
  4. Collaboration, Don’t Just Comment:
    True, Google Docs allow contributors to comment and suggest edits. You can also collaborate in real-time or as each participant is able. Version history lets you look back at who contributed, when, and where. You can name versions to track official revisions or specific working copies of documents.
  5. Schedule Productivity, Not Just Appointments:
    Your personal and shared calendars track your time as well as project or team activities. Resource calendars let you book rooms or any scheduled resource. Integrated with Hangout Meets, automatically include voice and video conferencing for the human touch. Integrated with Chrome for Meetings and you have 1-click video conferencing with screen sharing in your conference rooms.
  6. Manage Customer Relationships, Not Data:
    Integrated CRM applications, automatically pull person and company data into your CRM records and automatically track inbound and outbound emails with your prospects. Side panel gives you “pane of glass” access and context from within your Gmail inbox.
  7. Manage Communications, Not Data:
    Integrated sales and marketing tools, empower you team to better manage marketing, sales, and service communications without leaving your Gmail inbox.  Templates, mail merge, and tracking save time and energy as you drive your sales pipeline forward.
  8. Automate Tasks, Not People:
    Automate workflows and repetitive tasks, and build simple apps to boost productivity with AppMaker. The Low-code/no-code tool means you don’t need a cadre of programmers. Free up task time for more valuable activities.
  9. Protect Your Business; Not Just Data:
    Compliant archiving and e-discovery covers your email communications and your documents. Integrated solutions provide third party backup/recovery protection from accidental or intentional damage and loss. Cloud-to-cloud backup is less costly and requires less admin effort than traditional file server protection services.

Get the most value from your G Suite platform:

Our final G suite productivity tips include actionable ways to help your team ensure its workflow is up to date.

  • Verify you are on the right version of G Suite, with the capabilities that best meet your needs
  • Help your team learn how to use the G Suite apps to their fullest
  • Integrate 3rd party solutions for line of business needs, such as marketing, sales, and service

Please contact us for a free Cloud Advisor session to discuss getting the most value from G Suite.