Most Microsoft Office 365 users are aware of the Microsoft Teams application, which is often set to open automatically when starting up your computer. For the past couple of years, I just clicked this closed and then opened my email, web browser, and folders to access the files I needed to work on, but I've always wanted to check out what I could do with Microsoft Teams. If you're curious as well, or perhaps wondering whether to switch from other collaborative tools or project management platforms, read on to see why it might be worth checking out Microsoft Teams.

Tool Convergence

Now that I've finally taken a bit of time to check out Microsoft Teams, I wish I'd had something like this years ago when I was looking for a good project management tool. Of course, it's much more than just a project management tool: it's for internal communication and collaboration within teams, but also for sharing and keeping track of files within and outside of one's organization. It also lets you set up video or phone calls between team members and enables you to record a video of meetings and share them with anyone who was absent. In short, it combines a number of features into one app, which previously had to be coordinated between multiple applications such as Skype, Outlook, Chat, Calendar, and so forth. And really, that’s what Microsoft Teams is: it’s not a stand-alone app, but instead integrates several other Office 365 apps.

Best Practices & Advice on Whether to Adopt Microsoft Teams

If you’re using Microsoft Teams for the first time, check out a few of the best practice guides and adapt them for your own organization. Microsoft has a number of guides available, such as “Best practices for organizing teams in Teams,” “Assigning team owners and members in Teams,” and guides to get started, and there are many other best practice tips available if you search online for Microsoft Teams best practices. Everyone using Teams should know when to create a new team and when to use existing teams, or whether there should be one designated person who makes new teams and then invites others to join them. There are also guides on whether Microsoft Teams is the best fit for your project or team. For example, in an excellent Storyals video “Five tips on how to succeed with Microsoft Teams,” Ulrika Hedlund mentions that it may not be the best platform to use if there isn’t a lot of frequent interaction between team members, but that it works well for team members who are working across various locations. She also recommends having a set of “house rules” in place or internal best practices for using the app, along with telling everyone to access everything (such as email, files, chats, and so forth) through MS Teams. However, making everyone go through Teams rather than first going through their email or other apps can be difficult, since this is not how people normally access what they are working on if they haven’t already been using Teams, and it requires some persistence to get people to change their habits.

So Why the Hesitation?

The main downfall with Teams is that it can be difficult for the average user to just start using it if there isn't already a team they can join. And even when there is, many of the best practice guides for Microsoft Teams recommend having a designated team or individual to show others how to use Teams, along with having an onboarding process or training. Using Teams also requires changing how you and others think about organizing work and sharing it with others versus “siloing” drafts and various documents involved in a project. In many ways, however, it can be worth the initial learning curve. For example, a number of years ago I was working on a team project for a large non-profit organization, and when a team member left on vacation without sending other team members a few of the documents we needed to complete the project, we had to get IT to help us find those documents on the team member’s office computer (and some of the files ended up being unfinished anyway, so we had to complete much of the work that we thought had already been finished). Using Teams and sharing drafts of work would not only have helped with collaboration and keeping track of various documents involved in this project but would have made them available beyond the one individual’s computer. 

However, even the advice above about requiring onboarding and best practices shows that it’s harder for the average individual to get started with Microsoft Teams because there is more to learn before you can just get going. The collaboration and sharing with project-based teams and “channels” does seem to be the way forward when it comes to team-based projects, so hopefully more people will get used to using apps such as Teams that help to “unsilo” work and bring together multiple team collaboration apps within one platform. Perhaps the next stage in the development of Microsoft Teams will be to make it easier for people to get started with it and to be able to hit the ground running with minimal support and training. In the meantime, it is definitely worth checking out.

It wasn’t very long ago that the go-to presentation software was always PowerPoint. But there have been a few other options for a while now, with Prezi entering the stage almost a decade ago, and many people (especially students) now using Google Slides to collaborate on presentations. So which one should you choose the next time your company asks you to do up a presentation or slide show? As each of these platforms have competed for users over the years, in some ways they have become more alike rather than trying to appeal to a separate niche market. Google Slides has features similar to PowerPoint but with updated templates that are visually like a blend between Prezi and PowerPoint; Microsoft has developed more collaborative features for PowerPoint (and most of its Office programs); and Prezi has developed more sophisticated, traditional-style templates, and has also evolved quite a community around its platform. So, which one should you choose?

PowerPoint

Entire books have been written about the relentless repetition built into most PowerPoint templates (e.g. Edward Tufte’s 2006 The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within). However, like most tools, PowerPoint can be used to create something mundane and repetitive, or its features can be used more skillfully to create an engaging presentation. Even if we go back to its original function as “slideware” to replace the old analog slide projectors and overhead projectors, someone can create an engaging presentation simply by using images and leaving out all the bullet points that have given PowerPoint its negative reputation of being repetitive and boring or creating passive audiences. It is this customizability that makes PowerPoint still the number one choice for many experienced presenters who are comfortable using all of the tools available within the software rather than just filling in bullet point after bullet point in one of its ready-made templates. Most people don’t use any of the following tools, even though they can make your presentation look professional and run smoothly: transitions to set up how slides change from one to the next; slide show customizations, such as the ability to present online so others can see the slide show in a web browser; different views to see the presentation’s points in outline view, notes pages to see how it will look when printed out, and so forth; and the ability to share a copy of the presentation through OneDrive. With a bit of basic design skills, the shapes, icons, and tools in the design and draw tabs can also be used to add custom animations to diagrams and images. While these tools are built in to PowerPoint, it takes some getting used to them to use them quickly and skillfully, which is why you will often see people stick to the basic built-in templates (with bullet point after bullet point and minimal visual content), or they will move to some of the other options mentioned below that have more WYSIWYG design features.

Google Slides

Google Slides has been a hit with students and even some company teams working on group presentations due to how easy it is to collaborate. Similar to Google Docs, you can all work on the presentation at the same time and even see the changes each person is making while they are typing. Although Microsoft Office 365 has developed tools to make collaboration easier when writing documents or working on presentation slides, Google still often wins the race as the go-to tool when collaborating on a presentation project. It’s also free, and since many people already have a Gmail account, it’s easily accessible: just have someone give you permission to edit the presentation in Google Slides, and you’re ready to go (or start one yourself and then give your team members permission). It doesn’t have quite the sophisticated tools that PowerPoint does, but it’s getting closer, and it has enough for what the average user would want to do with presentation software. Another perk of Google Slides is that it allows users to upload a PowerPoint, edit it within Google Slides, and then convert it back to a PowerPoint presentation.

Prezi

Emerging in 2009, many presenters and audiences saw Prezi’s movement zooming in and out between slides as offering a more dynamic alternative to PowerPoint. Although it still follows much of the same pattern (moving from slide to slide, although with a less linear appearance, and still using bullet points within a template consisting of a background design or image), the product’s tagline, “Designed for people who aren’t designers,” provides a good summary of what separates this presentation software from others. For those who aren’t advanced PowerPoint users or used to including more images, diagrams, and interactive content such as videos and 3D models, Prezi can be a good tool to remind the average presenter NOT to just throw a bunch of bullet points on a slide and then sit back and watch each of them pop up with the next point in the presentation. It definitely shows the shift to more visual-based presentations, and it gives average users the tools to make that shift. However, like PowerPoint and Google Slides, it is still a tool, and users are sometimes limited by what is provided to them (and sometimes, even when software such as PowerPoint offers an abundance of features to customize presentations, most presenters will not use them unless they are easy to find and use). It also stores the presentation online, so it is easy to access just by signing in to your Prezi account, but this can also leave the presenter standing awkwardly at the front of the room if the Internet is down or it turns out there isn’t an Internet connection (you can download a Prezi with a paid account, but it can’t be converted to PowerPoint like Google Slides, just a PDF for printing out).

Other Presentation Software Tools

The above presentation software tools are the “main three” that tend to be used by presenters, but there are a number of other tools, whether free or available by subscription, that some people will use. They are often catered to a niche market or particular set of users, such as those who are also wanting to use the software to create marketing materials such as images for social media (e.g. Canva). Check out some of the ones listed in this Forbes article if you’re interested in exploring some of the other options. In our next blog post, we’ll be reviewing some of the presentation tools that aren’t as well known, so stay tuned for that: you might find one that’s exactly what you’re looking for!

Most people who have used SharePoint have done so through their office intranet. But SharePoint also has the ability to be a content management system for building external websites, and its permissions make it easy to assign roles to different people depending on who is in charge of particular sections of the website.

This allows for seamless contributions by multiple authors within an organization, who may each have been assigned to different sections of the website. Here are a few features SharePoint has that will help you set up a new company website from scratch or move your existing content to a new website.

1. Easy-to-use content editing tools look like other Microsoft Office products

As long as you or your employees are familiar with Microsoft Word and other Microsoft Office products, they will be familiar with the text editing tools in SharePoint. And getting people to edit sections of website content is much easier if you don’t need to train them to navigate a completely unfamiliar interface:

A nice feature of SharePoint is that you have the ability to click on the Edit Source button and change the html code directly, rather than only working with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) shown on the page. This enables end users who are comfortable with html coding to choose this option to make formatting changes on the page, while still allowing those who prefer WYSIWYG to avoid dealing with html code.

The Page editing toolbar contains functions that are a bit different than those in Microsoft Word (because you are editing a web page rather than Word document), but it still contains a similar look:

People can try out different page layouts with the click of a button, and go back to the original page layout simply by selecting it or exiting without saving the page.

These tools make it easy for anyone to manage your website and its content.

2. The look and feel of your website can be customized easily using templates

Just like Microsoft PowerPoint has different templates users can choose and then customize, so does SharePoint. SharePoint’s site menu enables users to change the look and layout of the website without having to know anything about html or code.

For example, if you’re creating a website for a sushi restaurant, choose the Sushi Black design, or start with a basic template and then use your own image in the background. The templates are generic enough that you’ve probably unknowingly visited a number of websites that use SharePoint.

SharePoint can be as customized as you want: if you want to start simple by using the built-in design templates and then eventually add more features, that’s completely up to you and your end users’ level of comfort.

3. SharePoint social plugins, App Parts and Web Parts can be added to customize your website

Anyone who owns a smartphone knows that most software and hardware are now built around apps. Apps (applications) enable customizability by adding features to a base framework. For example, if you own an iPhone, you know that when you purchased it, there were standard apps on your phone, such as your camera, photos, messages, calendar, notes, and mail. And you could go to the App Store to get additional apps such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so forth. SharePoint is set up in a similar way because you can choose to insert social plugins, App Parts, and Web Parts, simply by clicking on the appropriate button from the Insert tab:

Social plugins can be purchased from the SharePoint Store after clicking on the Social Plugins button. Many of these are free, although some will have a cost listed in their description. For example, one freely available plugin is OneBit Survey Master, developed by OneBit Software Ltd, which lets you create surveys, questionnaires, polls, and feedback forms to put on the website and then analyze and publish the results to your website. These are great for product reviews, feedback forms, and so forth.

Plugins, like apps, are usually created by non-Microsoft developers or companies. OneBit Software, for example, is not a Microsoft company, but it has created an app available through the SharePoint Store that can be used with Microsoft’s product. Apps for iPhone work in a similar way: some of the apps in Apple’s App Store are made by Apple, but most are not. This customizability through third-party apps is what many people see as the future for not only mobile devices but also websites, and SharePoint is set up to allow you to do this. 

In addition to social plugins, SharePoint users can also add App Parts and Web Parts to their pages. SharePoint’s built-in App Parts mostly consist of document lists and picture libraries, but along with Web Parts, they can be customized by developers and added as options for your page. For example, you can add a Web Part called Recently Changed Items to your page, which will display a list of any documents or pages in your site that have recently been updated.

There are, of course, terms that SharePoint users will have to become familiar with, even if they are already used to Microsoft products. For example, SharePoint uses the term site  to refer to each main section within an overall website, and you can also add subsites and pages to each site. Since most people think of the word siteas referring to the entire website, this can be confusing. However, it is a key method of how SharePoint is able to divide the overall website into sections that can be managed by different users with unique permissions, and once users are familiar with the basic terms, it becomes clearer whether to add a new site or a new page and how to structure pages using a hierarchy. 

The points above were just a highlight of how SharePoint can be used for your company website. For more information, check out Microsoft’s Getting Started with SharePoint 2013  or contact us and we’d be happy to help set up your website or train your employees how to use it.