Government Agencies Finally go Digital
Government agencies are among the slowest industries to adopt new technology, primarily due to security and regulation concerns, as well as years of legacy technology that impedes a digital transformation. But as cloud technology has become more widely adopted and more secure, government agencies are starting to modernize.
Microsoft’s Government Community Cloud updates follow last year’s Modernizing Government Technology Act, which is part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. The act requires federal agencies to increase cloud and collaboration tools, and vendors such as Microsoft are eager to meet those requirements.
Technology alone isn’t the answer to modernizing government processes, however. Supportive leadership and an agile process focused on worker efficiency and providing better service to constituents are required for a successful technological upgrade.
The question for many agencies isn’t whether to move to the cloud, but what services can be provided more effectively by moving workloads to the cloud, providing the agency with additional capabilities often with less internal cost and resources.
Jesse Scardina, 15 Mar 2019, Tech Target.
Introducing Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a unified communications platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. The service integrates with the company’s Office 365 subscription office productivity suite and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products.
Now available for Government Community Cloud High and Department of Defense environments due to improved security, Teams can provide agencies with a communication tool that supports more types of interactions.
Already using Teams? Read on to discover our 5 Quick Tips for Driving Communication in Microsoft Teams. Not sure if your Agency has been approved for teams, yet? Visit here to validate your organization’s eligibility for Office 365 U.S. Government offerings and request a trial in the Government Community Cloud (FedRAMP Moderate) environment.
5 Quick Tips for Driving Communication in Microsoft Teams
We’ve all had our fair share of workplace communication gaps. Maybe a coworker who private messages you project questions, when you need group feedback to respond. Or a manager who emails her team for status updates. Microsoft Teams eliminates barriers in teamwork. Allowing you to securely communicate and collaborate with your team in real-time. The best part about it, if you have a Microsoft subscription, you most likely already have the tools. If you’re interested in enhancing efficiency in your organization with Microsoft Teams, read these 5 quick tips below.
1. Have Conversations in Channels – How can you enhance collaboration and eliminate room for miscommunication? Bring your chats into the conversation tab of your channels. Channels are where collaboration happens. In Microsoft Teams, teams are groups of people brought together for work, projects, or common interests. Teams are made up of channels. Each channel is built around a topic, like project, a department name, or just for fun. Channels are where you hold meetings, have conversations, and work on files together. You will be amazed at how redundant emails and chats decrease as you increase drive conversations into channels.
2. Create an Interactive Agenda – Whenever you schedule a meeting in Microsoft Teams, you populate a Meeting Notes tab. This tab can be accessed before, during and after a meeting takes place. In order to maximize time, provide an agenda in your teams environment. You can even @mention coworkers to draw their attention to specifics or tasks, and hyperlink tabs. In turn, allowing attendees to join a meeting prepared, and leave with meeting minutes in hand.
3. Meet in Channels – I told you how chatting in channels can optimize communication, but how about hosting meetings in channels? By hosting meetings in channels you get all of the great features of a Teams meeting but the meeting notes, whiteboard, chat, and even recording are persistent in the channel. This means, once the meeting ends, your meeting content is still easily accessible in your channel.
4. Create an Org-wide Team for Announcements – By creating an org-wide team for company announcements, you continue to drive communication into your teams environment, and eliminate the cringe-worthy ‘reply all’ responses from coworkers.
5. Treat your Activity Feed as your Internal Inbox – Managing an inbox can be overwhelming. When you drive internal communication into Teams, your inbox will be much quieter. Think of your Teams activity feed as your internal inbox. Use the filter feature to easily view what is important to you.
There you have it. My top 5 tips for driving communication in Microsoft Teams. At Capitol Presence, we specialize in O365 implementation and adoption. Want to know how we can make your environment work for you? Contact us today! From creating bots to take the grunt work out of administrative tasks, to end user training – our Microsoft experts will allow you to work less and do more.
Author: Halie Edwards
Source: Capitol Presence
