Calling in Teams: Collaboration Made Simple

I think we can all agree that 2020 has been a wild ride when it comes to communicating with our coworkers. Instead of face to face meetings or cubicle chats, we’ve been in virtual meetings. Personally, I haven’t noticed an increase in the amount of instant messaging, but I have noticed that a lot of my messages end in a call, like this:

Hey, I was just on a call with client ABC and we were talking about DEF. Do you have a minute to hop on a call and debrief with me?

I’ve also been pulled into active calls as my expertise comes into scope. I’ll get a chat “hey we’re on the phone with this team and there’s a compliance question, can we loop you in?” I can join the active call immediately without having a meeting invite or starting a new call. What a world!

However, I’ve started to wonder if I am using the call features in Microsoft Teams as well as I could be? Are there features I’m not aware of yet? With so many people rapidly adopting Microsoft Teams, I can’t be the only one wondering this, so let's take a look at some of the features Microsoft Teams has when it comes to calling, including the new Collaborative Calling.

Microsoft Teams Templates 101: Getting Started

Microsoft Teams templates allow you to introduce a pre-defined structure to Teams across your organization so you can maintain consistency throughout your digital workplace. Having consistency across teams and channels has several benefits for both administrators and end-users, making the Microsoft Teams experience much more enjoyable. In this article, we will be taking a deep dive into Microsoft Teams templates, how they work, and how you can utilize them within your organization to drive a more predictable Microsoft Teams user experience.

PAIT Group Now Has Four (4) MVPs

PAIT Group is pleased to announce another member of our team has been awarded an MVP for 2021- 22. Joy T. Apple, better know as JoyofSharePoint, was award the Office Apps and Services MVP for 2021-22. Microsoft awards the MVP to a select group of individuals every year based on expertise and commitment to the community.

My favorite 5 Features of Microsoft Lists: A List

Microsoft Lists officially dropped in August, and now that we’ve all had some time to play around it’s a good time to create a list of our own: our favorite five (5) features or functions of Microsoft Lists.

To start, what is Lists? Didn’t SharePoint already have lists? Yes it did, but the custom list feature in SharePoint was pretty well restricted to SharePoint. You could create columns and content types and all sorts of views and pretty ways to present data and metadata and datadatadatadata, but the only ways to use that data out of SharePoint was an export, typically Excel. With Microsoft Lists you can take that same data manipulation power and use it in Teams, SharePoint, or as a standalone application. In addition, you can use Power Automate (formerly Flow) to crunch that data even better.

Before we dive in .... We discussed this topic in webinar form click here to check out the discussion.

Ok now lets dive in!

Tips for Staying Sane in the New Ever-Changing World of Remote Work

I recently read a great blog by Upwork about the future of remote collaboration and how organizations are reevaluating not how they think about their teams but how their teams’ needs are met. It’s definitely a struggle that has very abruptly come to the surface for practically every business in the last 6 months.

Real World Lesson On The Importance of Governance in Microsoft 365

This is my face when I read about the KPMG error deleting user’s private chats in Microsoft Teams. For those who aren't familiar with the KPMG story 145,000 of the global user personal Teams chats were deleted.

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