Leverage Microsoft Teams as a Business Platform

Leveraging Microsoft Teams as a Business Platform

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a combination of modules and components, with communication and collaboration at its core. Teams allows for communication inside and outside the business.
Microsoft Teams is also an online video conferencing platform. It includes desktop sharing in individual and conference settings.
Teams also extends its collaboration capacity into a robust document management system that provides access to a repository of company assets.

The Growth of Microsoft Teams

As more and more of us work from home, Teams has grown in popularity. Microsoft has seized this as an opportunity to standardize on this platform as they have invested more and more into this product. Why? Because it has far-reaching benefits to pull in disparate applications and functions into one cohesive application that impacts various parts of the organization.

Opportunity for Your Business

Leaf sees this as a strategic opportunity for your business to use the components of Teams to go wide and deep and bring key business applications together within your organization.
Leaf has helped companies use Teams as a platform to extend, scale, and grow the impact Teams has on the organization. There is potential to strategically leverage MS Teams to impact far reaching areas of your business.

Eliminating Repetitive Tasks

How can Microsoft Teams be leveraged in your organization? One use case involves repetitive tasks like accessing an FAQ or Knowledge Base. MS Teams can be used to access content that exists and surface that content to your end users in a powerful and expedient fashion.
Let’s say you have a sales team making outgoing phone calls. They only want to make that call when that company is open. Prior to making the phone call, a separate application must be accessed to look up business hours. Once armed with that information, the original application is accessed, and the phone call is made. This back and forth between applications takes the user out of context and needlessly eats up a lot of time.
By leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Teams, the business hours lookup can be integrated with a chat bot, instantly retrieving information with a simple “What hours is the business open?” inquiry. The chat bot can be programmed to access the data that was once housed separately. The sales agent stays within the same context, saving time, and making more phone calls. Adding these time savings across your organization nets big benefits.
Microsoft has invested heavily in extending and building out a platform that can now be customized in ways that required custom programming in the past. If you’re intrigued by how Teams can further be expanded and deployed within your organization to surface business critical actions, let’s start a conversation.

Combining Business Applications Under One Common Platform

Business applications have traditionally been siloed and separated from communications tools like Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has created a broad platform called Power Platform where these silos can be eliminated.
We are seeing organizations that have a large user base in Teams – currently used for chat, collaboration, and video conferencing – seamlessly integrate formerly siloed business applications into Teams. This creates synergy and efficiency that saves hours of time per day.
Here is a use case: Your business is using Teams for chat, collaboration, and video conferencing. Let’s assume you have two other business applications, one used as an approval engine, and another that serves a sales order function. Today, those are separated so you have to switch contexts to access these other applications.
Microsoft now allows us to use their platform to consolidate these systems. The same functions performed within the separate applications can now be invoked within a common environment like Teams. You no longer have to switch contexts to access approvals, or to find a sales order. This information can be accessed natively within Teams. This creates efficiencies in the form of time savings.

We can partner with your organization to surface these types of opportunities to make your business more efficient. We can take disparate systems and bring them together using Power Platform. We’d love the opportunity to start a conversation.

Video: Extend, Scale, and Grow the Impact of Teams

Video: Eliminating Repetitive Tasks

Video: Combining Business Application Under One Common Platform

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