24 Feb Productivity boosting features of 365 – Co-Authoring
At the heart of every business – along with many other things – is collaboration. By collaborating through the use of meetings, conversations, or when actually working on a piece of work you can guarantee that the very best ideas are making their way into the finished product.
With remote workings’ exponential rise to popularity since the outbreak of Covid-19 and the advancements in technology, looking to reinforce this way of working into the foreseeable future, it has been difficult for businesses to get the best levels of collaboration from their team.
Let’s take a look at a specific job role – a marketing team leader, for example. It is the marketing team leader’s job to motivate his/her team to produce the best campaign ideas for new and existing clients. Usually, when on-premise, this individual will have no trouble walking across the office to see how his (or her) colleagues are progressing or calling the team into their own room to brainstorm ideas and come up with a collective decision based on the entire team’s collective input.
Can this same level of collaboration be achieved from home?
Will your team be able to produce work of the same calibre without motivation from their colleagues in the same room?
There is a technical solution to all of your worries!
Microsoft 365 and Teams
Collaborate more efficiently with Microsoft 365 and Teams.
Introduce Microsoft Teams to your team and boost your collaboration.
With the ocean of tools available to us on our workstations, it’s particularly problematic to figure out which ones are the best to use. Teams is Microsoft’s answer to a one stop shop for all applications, boasting the full range of day-to-day communication and collaboration tools that any team in any environment could possibly require. Microsoft Teams can and will solve all of your internal communicational challenges no matter your (or your recipients) geographical location.
Let’s take a very brief look at some of the tools Teams has to offer.
Teams allows you to chat instantly with your workforce within its single platform environment, across any device that you use, whether you need to send a message, a file attachment or just a reminder. By uniting the conversation, Teams provides a seamless way to converse without the confusion of numerous emails and countless versions of the attachment. Finally say goodbye to emails forever!
Who’s got time for messaging, right? Can’t I just make a call? I hear you ask. The answer quite simply is yes. Within the Teams application, you can access voice and video conferencing between two or multiple users, whether you’re on-the-go or on-premise. All of that and more in one application!
But the particular tool that will boost your levels of collaboration is co-authoring.
Co-Authoring within Microsoft 365 and Teams
“With Office and OneDrive or SharePoint, multiple people can work together on a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PowerPoint presentation. When everyone is working at the same time, that’s called co-authoring.” ¹
Before Co-Authoring, if multiple members of your team were to be involved in composing a single document multiple copies would need to be created, saved and sent around via email to all members. This creates a chaotic work environment and makes it easy to misplace the most recent version of the document.
Can It help your business?
The answer is yes! It can help any business!
Using the example from earlier, you are head of the marketing team and with the rapid change to remote working, are worried about your team’s opportunities for collaboration being non-existent. To ensure you do your job properly and in turn, the output of the company stays to an exceptional standard, your team need to be able to work together on campaigns. Unfortunately, due to the current climate, this is not geographically possible.
This is where Co-Authoring comes in. It allows your team to work together through technology. All of the team can access documents and PowerPoint slides at the same time and can communicate within a chat feature incorporated into the Co-Authoring feature.
Now you know that co-authoring can help your team, let’s take a closer look at how to use it.
Can anyone use it? If so, how?
Anyone can use it. Take some time to read through these basic instructions to get you started on the pathway to having tech as a valuable ally to your team.
- Open a document of your choice in Word as normal.
- Place the document into the Cloud to allow co-authoring to be possible. To do this go to the top right of your screen and click ‘Share’.
- An option will now appear in the centre of your screen asking you to upload to OneDrive.
- Once having selected OneDrive, it will upload the document for you. It is now available to be shared with others.
You can then choose to allow or restrict entry to the document with passwords and other means.
It’s as simple as that! You can now co-author with your entire team at once, allowing you to carry on performing your duties to the best of your abilities and get the most out of your team by mirroring levels of productivity, collaboration, and communication experienced on-premise.
There are also features within co-authoring to improve your experience, which are as follows:
- At the top of the document, you can see who is co-authoring with you.
- You can see what part of the document your colleagues are working on by locating their cursor on screen. It will move in real time where they are working, and their name will be displayed above the cursor (so it will be clear who you are watching).
The above is just one of the countless examples where co-authoring – and in extension Microsoft Teams – can help to achieve greater levels of communication, collaboration, and productivity than was ever thought possible from technology.
Still not sure?
Do you want to implement it but don’t know if your IT team will be able to, or even willing to if stuck in their ways?
Look no further than Varatech!
Better utilise the power of the cloud with VaraTech
At Varatech, we provide a service encompassed in three key customer-centric pillars; simplicity, education, security. With these in mind, we take away all of your IT headaches.
Our expert team are relied upon as trusted partners for affordable and reliable IT systems for small to medium businesses across both London and Manchester.
We can assist you in introducing the Microsoft Tasks application – as well as the whole Microsoft 365 suite – into your organisation to better harness the power of the cloud to aid your productivity and profitability.
If your IT is causing you challenges or you seek to better utilise the advantages of modern technology, we can help. Please reach out to our team today by contacting us to schedule a free discovery call.