Is your company workflow scattered across various platforms? Does your organisation lack efficiency when completing projects or tasks? Or are your in-office and remote colleagues lacking connectivity?
Leveraging the collaborative features of Microsoft Teams can boost productivity, leading to a more successful and coherent workplace. By integrating communication, file sharing, and project management within a single platform, MS Teams helps develop a collaborative workspace with easy access to all the relevant resources your team needs to perform well at their job.
Key Features of MS Teams for Collaboration
MS Teams offers a world of collaboration opportunities with direct messaging, seamless integration with other Office 365 programs and a range of customisable features to suit any team’s needs and boost productivity and efficiency.
Chat and Communication Channels
Whether you need to ask your remote colleague a pre-meeting question or spend time in-depth planning for a project with a larger group, MS Teams offers a solution. Chats are a more private option for one-on-one or smaller group conversations, while channels are designed for broader, public groups or whole team discussions.
You can easily share files in both chats and channels.
Integration with Office 365
One of the standout benefits of using MS Teams for business is its seamless integration offered with the entire Office 365 suite, including Outlook, OneDrive, Excel and PowerPoint.
With just a few clicks, you can easily share a Word meeting agenda in a chat or send an Excel budgeting sheet to your manager for quick approval. Need to collaborate on PowerPoint slideshow? Simply send it to the team member presenting for them to make real-time edits and updates.
Customisable tabs
The tabs feature in MS Teams allows teams to make important documents, tools or websites easily accessible to everyone within a chat or channel.
For example, the sales and marketing team could add a tab to their internal team channel interface linking to a PowerBI report. This report can be accessed and updated by the entire team without anyone needing to leave the MS Teams window. A wider range of tabs are available in channels than chats such as SharePoint and Planner integrations. Additionally, you can add tabs for external programs such as Asana and Trello, or even website links for maximum ease for your team.
Advantages of File Sharing on MS Teams
Security features
Microsoft Teams offers robust security features to ensure it’s safe for your organisation to share confidential, private or sensitive documents within the program.
Encourage all members of your organisation to enable two-factor authentication. This additional layer of security helps prevent unauthorised access to Microsoft Teams accounts, and ensures no unauthorised access to shared files or documents.
You can utilise permissions strategies to control which team members can access specific channels and files. This ensures any internal confidential information can only be viewed by those who absolutely need it.
Real-time collaboration
The ability to collaborate with colleagues in real time provides an invaluable boost to team efficiency, productivity, collaboration and cohesion. This feature offers an opportunity to provide feedback, share ideas and exchange information instantaneously, regardless of where in the world your team is working from.
File storage and access options
The flexibility of MS Teams’ file storage and access options allows for further ease in sharing and collaboration. Documents shared in chats are stored in OneDrive, and available to anyone involved in the conversation. Meanwhile, files shared on a channel are stored in the associated SharePoint, again available for all channel members to access and edit.
Step-by-Step Guide to Effective File Sharing in MS Teams
The first step towards successful file sharing in MS Teams is setting up teams and permissions accurately. Ensure each team member has the appropriate level of access to shared documents whilst protecting the security and confidentiality of certain files.
Develop company guidelines around best practices for file sharing. It will be beneficial to instruct employees to upload files directly into the appropriate channels, rather than into a personal drive. This helps to maintain the centralisation of documentation. Create folders within teams and channels to aid the easy retrieval of information. Now is a good time to add team-specific tabs and other integrations to channels as we discussed above.
Encourage your team to edit and share documents in real time and provide training on this if necessary. This allows multiple team members to collaborate on a document at the same time, enhancing productivity and ensuring everyone is working on the most current version.
Take advantage of version history and recovery options within MS Teams. This feature is crucial for seamless teamwork and the retrieval of old drafts where necessary.
Case Studies: Success Stories of MS Teams in Action
So many businesses have experienced the benefits of collaboration and integration within MS Teams, enhancing their workflows, meetings and overall teamwork.
This European consultancy firm wanted to streamline workflow across the organisation’s 2500 employees. One of the key stumbling blocks was the lack of a standardised file-sharing platform across the company. Sometimes Dropbox was used and, in other scenarios, Slack or Skype, another popular video conferencing platform was favoured.
This led to a range of challenges including time wasted while searching for information, difficulties tracking the progress of projects and the potential for unsecured data.
The solution was to leverage the capabilities of MS Teams. The company was already using some programs in the Office 365 suite, so the transition was seamless. New initiatives included implementing Task Planner within teams for more accurate project tracking, ensuring all necessary permissions were in place for team governance and developing an add-on for easy access to documents in SharePoint.
These changes resulted in unified collaboration across the organisation—particularly for remote workers—speedier completion of projects and deals and cost savings thanks to the need for fewer platform licenses than before.
Experience the Benefits of MS Teams Collaboration Today
Every business wants to work more efficiently, have more productive employees and improved project success. Leveraging MS Teams for file sharing can help you achieve all of these goals.
If you think the features and integrations outlined in this blog would benefit your business, sign up for a Priority Management training course today. Our expert facilitators are here to help you work better and smarter—we’re the trusted leaders in workspace solutions.