Microsoft announced a few days ago the free version of Teams. It is a strategic move for several reasons. One of them is that this tool is supposed to stop using Skype in the near future. Besides, Microsoft is taking giant steps in what could be the revolution of the group calls with included 3D holograms. In summary, Teams aims to consolidate itself as a key application in the transformation processes that large corporations are carrying out, SMEs and AAAPP in the new digital labor paradigm 4.0.
HR departments. of companies have no choice but to accelerate the adoption programs of the 21 digital competences of the EU framework among its workers. Opposite case, your companies could be left behind in the race to take on new roles in the digital age. And of course, when the area 2 of these competencies is included in the category of “Communication and collaboration” Many managers HR staff. directs his gaze towards Office 365 as a facilitator of change.
The workers “pioneers” They have always sought in their life the technologies that improve their work processes. It is these types of workers who discovered the Whatsapp in its beginnings to communicate by mobile chat, who created accounts Dropbox to share files, those that were created board of Trello to conveniently organize your tasks or those you started with Loose as a tool for teamwork. Before the irruption of all these technologies “Communication and Collaboration” Microsoft woke up late. Despite this, Not only has he already stretched himself but he decided to throw himself on the table to compete against all these isolated tools with the Office suite 365.
Given the ignorance of many people of the functionalities of the different Office applications 365, I detail some of them as facilitators of the adoption of these digital skills among the workers of your company.
- Microsoft Teams = Clearance. Digital competence: “collaborating through digital technologies”
Web Application, mobile or desktop to create work teams and communicate with them through chat / conversations. The goal of Teams is to find more fluid and agile conversations between workers from different teams. It has many more features to make life easier for team members, I describe them here, you better discover them yourself … is free;)
- Microsoft Planner = Trello. Digital competence: “creative use of digital technologies”
Organize all the tasks of your team and give them due dates. I see more and more different industries trying to take the approach “Scrum” used by software developers. This methodology is very efficient when organizing tasks, prioritize them, times and keep the team focused. Without Planner being a tool “Scrum”, could take over this role for different team profiles in a company: administrative, maintainers, consultants, etc.
- Sharepoint = Business Dropbox. Digital competence: “data management, information and digital content”
This competition indicates: “organize, to stock, process, extract information in a structured environment”. Sharepoint es intranet + document manager. Many managers They ask me about using OneDrive or Sharepoint (Microsoft document storage and sharing tools). I answer that Sharepoint is like the municipal library: the books (documents) organized and accessed as decided by the librarian. OneDrive is for personal use within the company and it is up to the employee how to organize documents through folders.
At the same time, Sharepoint is more than a document manager. As an example, your list building tool should put an end to indiscriminate use of shared Excel for different purposes: Equipment inventory, incident management, mileage payments, etc.
- PowerApps. Digital competence: “identification of technological needs and responses”
This competence is included in the area 5 of “Problem solving”. PowerApps enables you to create custom business applications to solve very specific problems. Commercial applications that have been on the market for years have grown so large and are trying to accumulate so much functionality that workers are afraid to confront them frequently.. Besides, they weren't born in the age of UX (interfaces intuitivas) and its user experience is abominable in several cases. PowerApps was born to solve needs through essential applications in an intuitive way.
In our company, technicians had difficulty presenting Dynamics 365 – Project management the hours invested in the tasks of each project. Regularly, the tool covers many functionalities for the global administration of a project, many of them unnecessary for us. Our technicians only needed an intuitive application that allowed them to select the project in which they were involved, indicate the hours invested each day and add the description of the task.
We decided to create a PowerApps integrated with Dynamics 365, We embed it as a tab in Teams and it can also be downloaded to your Android or iPhone. At the same time, we create a notification Push to notify you on your mobile at the end of the day to enter the hours. ¡Woala! … goodbye to excuses that the procedure is a bummer.
At the same time of these Office tools 365, the suite is completed with so many others that also facilitate the indicated digital skills.
- Flow: automate processes. It is a tool of the IFTTT type (If This Then That). Example: if I receive an email with an attachment, I automatically save it in a specific Sharepoint folder. This is a very simple example of Flow, where truly complex processes can be automated between different business applications (Microsoft or external to Microsoft).
- Delve: intuitive document search.
With everything previously described, Office 365 it is an ideal technology to build on it the long-awaited digital culture within companies.
Would you be interested in knowing more?
