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!

Many companies and organizations now have intranets that allow individuals to create their own blogs or contribute to monthly staff blogs.  This is a fantastic way to connect with people across the organization and to really have your voice heard within the company. Follow these tips for success with your intranet blog:

1. Choose a theme

Choose topics that are directly related to your department, unless you are posting to your individual blog on your profile page. Some topics might expand on information that would come up in “watercooler” discussions, such as the following:

• Your summer travel adventure and recommendations for travel locations for your colleagues.
• Nominations and awards received by colleagues in your department (which may include a compilation of awards received over the past year).
• Other tributes or congratulatory messages.
• Professional development activities undertaken within your organization.
• Upcoming events related to your department, such as staff conferences or reviews/reports of past events.
• Information about hobbies and activities that other employees may be interested in, such as gardening tips, local restaurant reviews or quick lunchtime workout ideas.

Blog themes should be positive and avoid critiques of the organization or employees. Avoid the following topics:

• Politics, religion, and other polarizing topics.
• Intensely personal topics.
• Any posts that single out a particular employee, even if they appear to be positive/non-critical, if that employee has not given his or her consent.

Because you are writing a blog, you might also want to choose a topic that you could build upon through weekly or monthly contributions, or that you could compose as a succession of stories. Broadening your topic can help you to fit it into a succession of stories. For example, rather than calling your blog “My Summer in India,” you could call it “Staff Travel Recommendations” and make your first post about your experience travelling in India, and then allow other staff members to contribute their posts to your blog.

Remember that not all intranet content is approved by communications departments before being posted (for example, if you are posting on a personal blog or on your intranet profile), so if you have questions about whether your post is appropriate, you can usually ask your communications or human resources department to check it over before publishing it. 

2. Include a bio

Keeping your biographical information up to date on your organization’s intranet will help give your blog post some context for those who are from other offices or who may not yet know a lot about what you do within the organization. You could also add a paragraph at the end of your posts in the following format:

Janet Smith is a Human Resources Consultant in the Calgary office. She enjoys gardening, yoga, and jogging, and she likes to spend her summer vacations exploring new travel destinations. Janet joined the HR team in 2008.

3. Establish credibility

You should hold your posts to a high standard and ensure they have been polished and proofread before being published:

• Avoid errors (in factual content but also in typos and proofreading errors); if you notice an error, correct it as soon as possible.
• Provide fair and impartial opinions and assessments.
• Give attribution to any ideas or Web content that you did not come up with on your own (using citations in parentheses or by providing links to the information source).
• Encourage reader comments by keeping the comment feature active and by responding regularly to those who have commented on your posts (many intranets use content management systems that enable you to set up notifications for any comments on your blog posts).
• Keep content fresh by asking others to contribute to your blog and by following others’ blogs (both within your organization and on the Web) to keep on top of trends in your subject.

4. Stick to a schedule

One of the best ways to attract and keep the interest of readers is to keep a regular posting schedule, whether it is daily, weekly, or monthly. Many regular bloggers will follow an editorial schedule that they have planned out for when they will post and what content they will include based on the time of year (e.g. August long weekend vs. Thanksgiving). Make sure you are not posting too frequently, however, or your audience may end up skipping most of your posts if they are too busy to read them. Weekly, biweekly, or monthly posts might work best, depending on your topic and your audience.

If you are ever at a loss for words when it is time to make a blog post, you can try different inspirational techniques such as freewriting, which involves writing freely and quickly for 10-15 minutes. Usually at the end of a freewriting session, any writer’s block will have evolved into ideas for a new post.

5. Improve readability through graphic highlighting, being concise, and creating scannable text

If your readers can quickly scan through your blog and pick out your key points, it is much more likely that they will read it. The more you use headings, bullet points, concise wording, and clear text, the more likely it is that your audience will keep reading and enjoying your posts.

Many bloggers do not realize that writing for the web is different than writing for print. It can be a challenging shift for those who are used to writing for print, but it can also be a lot of fun and will connect you to an audience in a way that allows you to reach out beyond those you could access using print only.

When it comes to writing for your organization’s intranet, it can help you connect to people across your organization in a way that goes beyond lunch room or hallway and watercooler conversations. Most importantly, have fun, and enjoy creating your first blog post!