Microsoft Teams & Zoom have become the essential management & productivity tool for virtual teams.
With millions working from home, it's essential to understand the different productivity tools available to help your remote and virtual teams. Organizations must be able to stay agile and competitive in today's climate, and all your workers must possess the ability to communicate and collaborate virtually in real-time easily. Two of the most prominent tools available are Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
What is Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is the unified communication and collaboration platform in Microsoft 365 that builds on existing Microsoft technologies woven together by Microsoft 365 Groups. Teams is designed for teamwork and flexibility.
Microsoft Teams has many core components that make it stand out from other collaboration software:
Teams and channels. Teams are made up of channels, which are conversation boards between teammates.
Conversations within channels and teams. All team members can view and add to different conversations in the General channel
A chat function. The primary chat function is commonly found within most collaboration apps and can occur between teams, groups, and individuals.
Document storage in SharePoint. Every team that uses Microsoft Teams will have a site in SharePoint Online, which will contain a default document library folder. All files shared across all conversations will automatically save to this folder. Permissions and security options can also be customized for sensitive information.
Online video calling and screen sharing. Enjoy seamless and fast video calls to employees within your business or clients outside your company.
Online meetings and Live Events. This feature can help enhance your communications, company-wide meetings, and even training with an online meeting function that can host up to 10,000 users. Online sessions can include anyone outside or inside a business. This feature also includes a scheduling aid, a note-taking app, file uploading, and in-meeting chat messaging.
Audio conferencing. With audio conferencing, anyone can join an online meeting via phone. With a dial-in number that spans hundreds of cities, even users that are on the go can participate with no internet required. Note this requires additional licensing.
Why Should Your Organization Use Microsoft Teams?
Did you know Microsoft Teams is already included in Microsoft 365? If you already have Microsoft 365, then you already own Teams. Now you just have to use it!
Microsoft Teams is exceptionally user-friendly and can facilitate a work environment between remote users or a large business. Projects, productions, and other business elements can benefit from Microsoft Teams.
For businesses already using Skype for Business, the Teams client will replace the Skype client, but all additional existing functionality will remain the same.
What is Zoom?
Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing platform that can be used for video conferencing meetings, audio conferencing, webinars, meeting recordings, and live chat.
Zoom offers four distinct pricing plans, from basic to enterprise. What's right for you depends on how you plan to use the app.
Zoom Basic: This is the platform's most popular pricing tier, which makes sense, considering it's free. This tier offers unlimited one-on-one meetings, but videoconferencing with more than three participants is limited to 40 minutes (you can always start another one). If you plan to use it only once in a while to chat with friends or family, check out our general overview of Zoom's basic features.
Zoom Pro: The Pro plan is ideal if you work with a small team or regularly conduct extended video calls. Beyond extending the group meeting length from 40 minutes to 24 hours, this tier allows hosts to create IDs for recurring meetings and store recorded meetings in the cloud, plus advanced usage reports.
Zoom Business: A pricing plan to make collaboration easy for small to midsize companies, the Business tier requires at least ten hosts. But what you get in return is company branding on all invites, dedicated customer support, and more features like auto-generated transcription.
Zoom Enterprise: This tier is designed for large businesses, and sign-up requires a minimum of at least 100 hosts. Enterprise offers plenty of perks, including unlimited cloud storage, a dedicated "customer success manager," and the capacity to host 500 people on a single call.
Zoom's core features:
One-on-one meetings: Host unlimited one-on-one meetings.
Group video conferences: Host up to 500 participants. Note this requires additional licensing.
Screen sharing: Meet one-on-one or with large groups and share your screen with them so they can see what you see.
Zoom Training overview
Our Zoom training specializes in helping people run better and more efficient meetings and be better attendees.
1. How to be a good zoom attendee
So, you have Zoom, that's great. And you have your first Zoom meeting on the schedule. Now, what do you have to do on a Zoom meeting? Save time and energy by being a great attendee. This part will review the basics of being an attendee and joining a meeting to muting and unmuting.
2. How to host a zoom
Hosting your first Zoom meeting can be a little intimidating. We will review how to be a good host and everything that goes into scheduling and organizing your Zoom meetings.
3. How to facilitate a meeting
There is more to Zoom meetings than just hosting one-on-one meetings. We will help you put together an engaging meeting with interactive features such as whiteboards, polling, and co-hosts.
4. Large meetings and logistics
Ready to host a Zoom meeting with 50, 100, or even 500 guests? We will help you understand all the logistics behind a large group meeting. We will review recording the meeting, managing chat rooms, and more.
The Excel & Flourish Process
Since 2012, we have held firm to our belief that training should be fun to be effective. Capturing an employee's attention is the first task when trying to train. Our playful and informative style separates Excel &Flourish from the sea of online webinars and cattle call competitors. Our day is made when an employee sits back from their screen with a satisfied smile, knowing they will save hours of work every week because of a new method or trick.
While we make sure our training is enjoyable, the content isn't fluff. Our classes are laser-focused on the most relevant, up-to-date information available. We're the training company employees want back, and we partner long-term with employers to improve productivity and grow their business.
No one size fits all
We know every company and organization is different. That's why we provide customized training based on your organization and people.
We start by creating a needs analysis for your team. A needs analysis is essential because it identifies areas we need to focus on for your customized training. We determine who needs training, different department training, and goals. After that, we review the results with you and create a comprehensive training plan for your organization.
Then we execute the training plan. Our customized training classes focus on your organization and what your team needs to succeed. We prefer to provide onsite training when available so we can work closely with everyone at the organization.
We know times have changed, so we do offer virtual training as well. This closely mirrors in-person training by using Microsoft Teams or Zoom. We believe in providing more than just a slide deck to have a real person online with a webcam and so live questions and answers, just like an in-person event.
After the initial training is complete, we give you detailed reporting into the training. We will review:
Topics covered
Question and Answers
Attendee lists
Survey results
Additional feedback if available
Next steps and recommendations