1. What kinds of challenges are businesses solving with MS Teams apps?

Hilary Oliver, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer at Tollring:

“As businesses increasingly rely on MS Teams to facilitate remote or hybrid working, they need information and insights to understand how changes to working behaviour are impacting the business and its people.”

“Workplace Analytics for MS Teams reveals valuable patterns and trends in real-time to help:

  • Balance workload and manage attention. Identify individuals involved in back-to-back meetings, working outside of normal hours or repeatedly late for meetings which may signal meeting fatigue or work overload. Check individuals have enough time aside to carry out their work outside of meetings.
  • Drive the right engagement both internally and externally. Insights can be used to share best practices, analyse collaboration trends, reduce frustration, and work more intelligently.
  • Ensure staff wellbeing to drive staff retention. Understand sentiment, team performance and employee satisfaction. Help managers to understand one-on-one time in line with individual needs.”

Mark Bunnell, the Chief Operating Officer of NUWAVE:

“The need for a hybrid work environment has led to fundamentally changing the way we approach communication and collaboration. Large organizations are managing multiple systems in an honest attempt to find the solution that best meets their needs. This allows for them to incrementally course correct and stay ahead of their competitors.”

“These solutions usually come wrapped with a high cost to manage, as balancing multiple platforms can result in a disjointed user experience, which leads to a lack of user adoption.”

“Another issue comes with the strain and increased workload that it puts on an organization’s engineering and IT teams who manage this multitude of systems through increased complexity.  A modern IT/engineer needs to be able to code in different languages as well as have the ability to integrate/manage different systems and apps as a cohesive strategy.”

Tom Arbuthnot, Solutions Director at Pure IP:

“To me, the applications in Teams all help to create an ecosystem that is all about improving the user experience and enabling collaboration. The growing number of applications that are available in Teams means that users can work where they are, rather than jumping around between different systems and environments to get anything done. Having such a breadth of apps right in Teams also makes it easier for everyone to collaborate on a project, as all the resources are in one place.”

  1. Has Teams become THE work hub for businesses? Can integrated apps deliver the right kind of experiences customers need?

Hilary Oliver, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer at Tollring:

“The stats speak for themselves! Global adoption is continually rising, and Microsoft Teams has become THE work hub for many businesses of all types and sizes. It has enabled employers to give their people the best possible workplace experience regardless of where they were based.”

“Apps that are accessed via the Microsoft Teams App Store are fully integrated into the Teams ecosystem, leveraging both organizational set up within Microsoft and the familiar experience for ease of use and efficiency.”

“Although familiar and easy to use, features have evolved very quickly (and continue to do so) so it is becoming increasingly important to focus on effective use of the tools and leveraging the data that can provide insights into working practice.”

Mark Bunnell, the Chief Operating Officer of NUWAVE:

“By acting as a central hub for these apps, Microsoft Teams is quickly becoming the THE Communication hub for business users and organizations looking to simplify their hybrid work environment. Microsoft Teams allows for a central location to manage all of the different platforms an organization needs for collaboration while allowing them to communicate with each other seamlessly. It gives you the flexibility and freedom you need to access your work from anywhere in the world, and on any device.”

“Integrated apps such iPILOT let you quickly and easily enable your Microsoft Teams Voice environment, with features such as emergency services customization, automated provisioning, Disaster Recovery Plans, and analytics.”

Tom Arbuthnot, Solutions Director at Pure IP:

“Teams has certainly become the default communications platform for many organizations, but I think there is more adoption and cultural change work to be done before it goes from a work hub to the work hub.”

“Users have had decades to get used to working over email, using resources from an intranet, and relying on familiar tools/systems to get the job done. Although working from Teams is more efficient on paper in many cases, in practice most organizations won’t be moving 100% of their BAU systems over all at once. And any period of change where Teams is competing with existing systems can lead to some confusion as some users get to grips with which files are saved where, and others revert to the old systems that they know.”

“That said, Teams is well on its way, and I could certainly see it becoming the work hub for organizations that are already heavy Microsoft 365 users in 2022, as it will be less of a leap for them.”

  1. Has Teams become THE work hub for businesses? Can integrated apps deliver the right kind of experiences customers need?

Hilary Oliver, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer at Tollring:

“The most important integrations are those that leverage the extensive Microsoft API stack to deliver true business value to Microsoft Teams users across the globe.”

“Functionality within the app is extensive so integrations also need to evolve alongside Microsoft’s aggressive roadmap. As functionality extends however, meeting fatigue and burn out are more common than ever and it is the responsibility of every organisation to learn how to leverage tools in order to achieve a successful balance of well-being and performance.”

“Workplace analytics is becoming critical to help identify key drivers of productivity, manage focus time and one-on-one time, introduce best working practice policies and to drive motivation for staff retention.”

Mark Bunnell, the Chief Operating Officer of NUWAVE:

“We need to be conscious that in an ideal future, we need to develop the solutions that simplify our lives, not complicate them. Apps like iPILOT, which enable your Microsoft Teams Voice and Phone number communications with carrier-level service features are here to stay. It is a one-stop shop that enables your hybrid work environment through on-demand scalability and automation features. In addition, iPILOT provides a high availability shop for Microsoft Teams Certified Phones and Devices.”

“By simplifying management, and creating robust automation features, apps like iPILOT are leading the way in reducing the strain and simplifying modern communications while further enabling a hybrid work environment.”

Tom Arbuthnot, Solutions Director at Pure IP:

“Naturally project and task management apps are popular, including both Microsoft’s native tools but also apps like Jira, Trello and Monday.com.”
“Power BI in particular is also popular because it can surface key reporting directly within the project workspace.”

“I think we will see more line of business integrations built on Power Platform in 2022, that will pull together different data from different sources and inspire new business-led applications.”

 

 



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