#HomeOffice: Communication first. Microsoft Teams and OneDrive come to the rescue

Forced #HomeOffice is for many a completely new reality for which they were not prepared. How to coordinate the activities of the team and colleagues? How to exchange information and data? Fortunately, there are great tools for this.

We work as a team in almost every organization or enterprise. Even if we have a unique or specialized position in the company, the effects of our work certainly have an impact on its other employees or clients. Mutual communication is key.

As long as we work in the office, everything seems simple. We have a team at a distance that allows for a quick face-to-face meeting and discussion of a given issue. After all, not everything can be quickly and efficiently explained by email. Today, however, it is difficult to meet. Fortunately, modern technology has long had the right answer to the need to work in a virtual office. We know something about it at Spider's Web - we've been working together for years, not having a physical editorial office.

The creators of Microsoft Office have prepared a tool that perfectly fits the current crisis. We're talking about Microsoft Teams .

Well, let's be clear: the Teams service was not built in response to the coronavirus epidemic. Actually, it is just by chance that it is just ending its third birthday today, and it is not overly innovative. Microsoft Teams is a copy of the Slack service, which we have been relying on Spider's Web for years.

However, we chose Teams here for two reasons. First of all, it's a service from the Office 365 family, so it's a bit closer to the tools that most of us know. Secondly, as we will explain in more detail below, we must admit that Microsoft has reacted appropriately to the current crisis. And it quickly transformed Teams from a commercial service to a tool that is supposed to help all of us - not necessarily just the company's customers.

Before we do that, however, it is worth explaining what Teams really is. It's a kind of group conversation (or IRC channel if we have older readers here), which we can organize in order to improve the flow of information instead of communication chaos. Conversations can be divided into individual topics or those relating only to a given group of employees. At any time, we can also use attachments or other tools known from typical messengers. Teams also supports group teleconferences, if the thematically divided text chats turn out to be insufficient at the moment.

As a user of a competitive tool, I can confirm that the application designed in this way, combined with our creativity in using its tools is something absolutely irreplaceable. Significantly improves the flow of information in the organization, increasing our reaction time to current events, and also facilitates planning of future work. Using a tool similar to Teams, we operate like a well-oiled machine - despite the fact that key people to the daily functioning of our company work in #HomeOffice every day in different parts of the country, and sometimes the world.

Why Microsoft Teams It is not even about possible integration with Office 365 , and above all about how the service is carried out in connection with the coronavirus epidemic .

Teams, like Slack, is available in a free and paid version with extended functionality. Not only Microsoft seems to give more in the free edition, but also for the time of crisis has unlocked the paid features available to corporate customers to all users so far. So you can harness Teams to work in full functionality and without any obligations - if everything returns to normal, we can say goodbye to the Microsoft service. Well - probably, and what Microsoft itself probably counts on - we will like it so much that we want to continue using it, even if we have to pay for it over time. The free period will last six months. It is also to be extended if - don't let fate - we still can't handle COVID.

https://twitter.com/JP_Courtois/status/1234947690724757504

The world is responding to this suggestion. Microsoft has already boasted that one of the professors of the famous 900-year-old university in Bologna began to conduct lectures and exercises with the rest of the teaching body using Microsoft Teams, attended by 80 thousand. students. The lecturer reported his impressions in this thread on Twitter . The Pennsylvania Hospital launched Teams as a platform for remote communication with patients. In the face of the crisis, the city of Osaka decided to use Teams to coordinate the training of new employees.

It seems to work. And basically it already works, because in recent days interest in Teams has increased by such an order of magnitude that the servers did not make and the service, instead of helping ... did not work. Fortunately, according to assurances, this situation is not to happen again. Let the dry figures speak for themselves: On March 11, Teams saw 32 million active users. On March 18, this number increased to 44 million.

Microsoft is just introducing a set of new features to make the tool work better in the current situation.

Those are:

• The mechanism of active noise cancellation , so that our home noises or the vacuum cleaner working somewhere in the background would not spoil all teleconferences
• A raised hand recognition mechanism to let the rest of the conference call notice that someone wants to speak
• Possibility to book a meeting in Teams , making it easier to meet our client virtually, since the physical meeting is difficult
• Offline mode if we have a very poor internet connection . Teams will allow us to continue reading messages that have arrived to us and send new ones and browse the rooms even if the connection to the server is broken - for people who use the Internet instead of fiber optics using a weak signal radio. When the connection is restored, the messages will be synchronized
• And also some other news for specific industries and needs, not quite related to current problems.

Microsoft Teams is a powerful tool. But it is worth supplementing them with OneDrive.

Although Microsoft Teams allows you to send attachments, this service focuses on organizing the exchange of information in conversations, not data exchange. OneDrive is used to organize and share documents and files needed for the daily functioning of the company.

Unfortunately, OneDrive for Business is already a paid service (a free version of OneDrive is also available, but for personal use). We have to pay 4.2 euros a month for each new user. However, given the convenience provided - and hence the work efficiency - this investment is likely to pay back.

Each of the OneDrive users in this cheapest version receives one terabyte of virtual space for their files and data. He has access to them safely using absolutely any device he has. It also provides the option of basic editing of Office files without the need to have a license for a desktop program package - for an additional fee you can unlock and advanced editing.

However, the key is the ability to share folders with each other. This means that a given employee can, for example, create a Document templates folder in their virtual memory and share them with the rest - parts with the option of editing, parts only with the copy or download function if necessary. The service tracks who made changes and which changes to all shared files and folders.

In addition, if we use a computer with Windows or macOS, the virtual memory of our organization in OneDriva can be seen by our computer as local memory - just like all other data on our computer.

We can additionally protect particularly sensitive data. This feature is also available in the free version of OneDrive for consumers. It's called Personal Magazine.

To get to the data stored in OneDrive's protected folder, it's not enough to just enter your account login and password. The service will ask, depending on the device or other criteria currently in use, for a previously defined private PIN, fingerprint or code from an SMS.

On Windows 10 computers, OneDrive synchronizes protected folders and files using BitLocker on the user's local drive. For each file in OneDrive, the contents of Personal Storage are encrypted during storage on the Microsoft Cloud platform, as well as during transfer to the device. The personal magazine and its equivalent in OneDrive for Business automatically blocks access to the folder after a short period of user inactivity. All previously opened files are also blocked. Accessing them requires re-authentication. Therefore, sensitive data can be protected against unauthorized access from outside or inside our team.

Microsoft Teams and OneDrive are not the only services of this kind, but my favorites.

Interesting alternatives to Teams are Slack and Google Meet. OneDrive, on the other hand, has strong competition from Google Drive and Dropbox. Microsoft services, however, seem to be my favorite today and the first of the suggestions that I would recommend at #HomeOffice. Not only because of the integration with Office 365 services and applications - which you probably use anyway - but mainly because they are constantly modified to help us survive this crisis. That's what it's all about.

#HomeOffice: Communication first. Microsoft Teams and OneDrive come to the rescue