Update: July 8, 2020

This blog post was originally posted in January 2020 before the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic touched us all in March. With the need to work remotely and/or work from home, the number of businesses reaching out to KnowledgeWave for support around Microsoft Teams quadrupled.

This blog post was very relevant for several businesses reaching out for guidance around Microsoft Teams deployment and Microsoft Teams training. Many of these new businesses seeking guidance knew that Teams is included and integrated with Office 365. They were already using Office 365, but weren't using Teams. Instead, they were spending additional money trying to use Zoom.

I originally wrote this licensing blog post back in May of 2016 and it received a lot of traffic and has helped many people in their planning for Office 365 deployments. I thought it was time for a new post to address some of the biggest licensing changes. Back in 2016, I noted that you couldn’t go a week without hearing about a well-known business making the move to Office 365. Companies are still making the move, but the buzz we hear now is around Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams.

As a partner to a number of top Managed Service Providers I want to pass along five common traits many of these MSPs have in common. Hopefully this insight will help you retain existing customers, win new clients, be a market differentiator, and grow your MRR.

Microsoft Planner is an Office 365 App that enables a team to organize tasks around their projects and workflow. It’s powerful too. While it is popular on it's own, independent of other Office 365 applications, it works amazingly well with Microsoft Teams.

On Tuesday, December 10th, Microsoft officially announced that their new flagship communication tool, Microsoft Teams, is now available to Linux users. With Microsoft touting Teams as a businesses communications hub, it appears they are taking on Slack – going directly after Slack’s user base – by supporting Teams on the Linux operating system in .deb and .rpm formats.

Microsoft Teams presents new ways for users to communicate and work around their projects and tasks. While Microsoft Teams is easy to turn on, adoption can be a challenge for many organizations. As the best practices around Microsoft Teams continue to mature, KnowledgeWave is keeping pace for our clients in several ways.

It’s a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation... Office 365 is constantly changing, and the way we work is continuing to change as well.

A move to Office 365 presents new ways for users to work with tools that they are already familiar using. These new ways to work provide considerable benefits, but without basic training users often don’t discover the advantages of using the cloud and Office 365.

Office 365 training helps those new to Office 365 continue to work with familiar apps while incorporating the cloud benefits. The goal is to boost productivity while respecting the natural rhythm of their workflow.

Microsoft Teams is getting a lot of buzz these days. Rightfully so, it’s changing how business and users collaborate around their work content and provides modern ways for us to communicate around our projects at work. Teams has lots of great features that help to serve up content easily, like Tabs that can display Excel Spreadsheets, Word Docs or PDF’s. Channels provide a great way for us separate topics, and they provide additional landscape for adding Tabs that are specific to those topics.

Microsoft Office 365 is the most dominant office software in the world with over 120 million business users today. With many previous versions of the software released, some older versions which are still in place today, it’s safe to say that knowledge of Microsoft Office is an essential part of participating in the workplace.

Much of the business world today either grew up or came into adulthood using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. As such, most of us have some exposure with these core flagship productivity tools, however, there remains a great deal of untapped potential with the transition to Office 365 and the cloud functionality it provides.

New technology implementations can be stressful for all types of companies, from small mom-and-pop shops to large corporations. Many companies have already made the switch to Windows 10 and are discovering ways to capitalize on the new features included with the upgrade. If you want to get the most out of your company’s Windows 10 upgrade, then following these tips can help you maximize its effectiveness to benefit your business.

Microsoft 365 is one of the most widely used business technology platforms in the world. Office 365 presents an opportunity for businesses to create a modern workplace for employees and offers advanced networking and communications tools that empower employees to carry out their job duties seamlessly as part of the natural rhythm of their work. However, no system is immune to malicious cyberattacks and being the number one business platform creates a target for those looking to take advantage ofunsuspecting businesses and their users.

In this post, we highlight some of the most common security breaches on Microsoft 365 and we’ll share some tips for IT administrators and Managed Service Providers (MSP) and how they can best address these threats for their users and clients.

Do your employees feel safe, valued, and heard by the leadership in your organization? How much have you done to promote a culture of safety and communication in your company? These issues can have a tremendous influence on employee productivity and retention rates. Investing in employees will allow them to perform better and will organically increase their job satisfaction. If you’re an HR manager looking to enhance company-wide productivity and job satisfaction, consider the following tips.

How does your organization promote “Leadership”?

If you are like most organizations staff that rise to leadership self-select through performance that is largely based on inherent leadership skills. Everyone has heard the phrase “born leaders”, but is this really the best way to create a culture of leadership?

Many times, people are put into leadership positions and simply succeed or fail based on their own ability to build leadership skills.

Microsoft Teams is a unified enterprise-level communications platform that offers fantastic utility to all types of organizations. Investing in Microsoft Teams provides consideration and the chance to replace aged business phone systems with a new modern integrated cloud-based communication tool. If you’re interested in ways to increase your company’s productivity, consolidating your communications structure, and enhancing internal strategizing companywide, consider the following reasons why your business may want to consider using the Microsoft Phone system with Microsoft Teams and Office 365.

Security is front and center at Microsoft, and rightfully so with now more than 180 million active users of Microsoft Office 365. Even the strong are susceptible to security attacks. The Microsoft Security Team has an extremely sophisticated threat response system in place that allows them to identify and solve security issues quickly.