The Rise of Remote Collaboration

Along with the massive influx of users working from home, there’s been a massive increase in remote collaboration.  The level of remote collaboration has been climbing steadily for several months – the tipping point is here –Microsoft Teams.

To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s review the recent growth of Teams usage:

• 22 million in November of 2019
• 32 million last week
• 44 million earlier this week

This growth is unprecedented and what’s even more interesting is that Microsoft was late to the market, as Slack had a huge head start. Industry analysis aside, the key is the more productive collaboration that’s happening here. Employees are going beyond idle chat to see what time they can meet, then meeting online, co-editing spreadsheets and sharing their work in real-time. End users are now pushing their IT teams to deliver collaboration and get away from traditional tools like file shares.

While Teams is technically free, it does come with strings attached. For instance, when a user shares a file with a co-worker on Teams, where is that file stored? What happens to that file if the employee loses it? Fortunately, there are several backup and archiving solutions for Teams. This is the tip of iceberg in the most positive way possible. Users are more engaged in their work than ever before and it’s resulting in better quality work. This has been the dream of many CIOs, but it was clearly the lack of tools that was in the way. Now that Microsoft has cleared away this issue, it’s impressive to witness.

For those who may not be aware, this platform is mostly powered by SharePoint or it’s SharePoint-based. There have been more failed rollouts of SharePoint by IT teams than have been successful. Teams could be called the biggest success of SharePoint in the history of Microsoft. Many of the users driving this success have only scratched the surface on what this collaboration suite can do. There are several additional ways to enable your employees including upgraded calling features, shift management and application integration with Teams.

If you have questions on Microsoft Teams, please contact us today.