Your questions. Our Experts' Answers

1. What is Microsoft Teams and what is it used for?

Microsoft Teams is the ultimate tool in terms of teams’ collaboration. Both remote and internal teams now can collaborate with greater efficiency, productivity and teamwork. In general, with Microsoft teams an organization can take advantage of its chat, online meetings and storage for their files. Microsoft Team offers a variety of features to cover all the needs a team might have and make sure they structure their working hours with a better organization and planning

2. What are the main features to take advantage of Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft teams has dominated the industry and countless businesses now trust their seamless collaboration on its features and tools. To mention a few, by using Microsoft teams, employees from all departments and geographical locations are able to:

• Create and use conversational channels (standard or private)
• Organize live meetings and calls
• Get access from all devices
• Connect from anywhere they are
• Reduce e-mail use and confusion
• Connect directly with clients, suppliers or vendors
• Track information fast and easy
• Integrate other applications
• Take advantage of slash command
• Mention someone with a @
• Create recording storage
• Pin apps
• Fully integrate with Office 365
• Access Skype, OneDrive and Sharepoint
• Create grid views to see all teams in one centralized place

3. What is the best way to use Microsoft Teams?

If you want to make the most out of Microsoft Teams, you can start by utilizing the below 5 features:

• Improve your productivity by making a switch from internal e-mail to chats.
• Get more from your shared files by moving them to Teams Files. It is much simpler to manage and guarantees complete security.
• Bring up to 10.000 people to your business meetings and share your screen to make sure everyone’s on track.
• Teams’ video meeting can host up to 250 participants and even if you are sitting right next to each other it is still better organized and aligns all the team.
• Access your phone through Teams desktop or mobile app and replace your phone system with Microsoft Phone System.

1. What are the most useful features of SharePoint Online for me?

For years, Microsoft Sharepoint has proved its value to countless organizations around the world. It offers many features to its users and the benefits are obvious even to someone who is using it for the first time. To mention a few:

• Friendly interface: From drag and drop, to touch and on-hover , sharepoint makes its use super easy and even fun as you save much precious time for standard activities.
• Enterprise online search: Customized search with metadata and filters gives more relevant results than ever helping you find what you were looking for.
• Site Mailbox: Sharepoint’s site Mailbox offers document management abilities where you can organize content related to specific project and e-mail them into a single view. All documents are stored properly and you can enjoy working more productively.
• Public Websites: Either it’s for a site or an individual page, there various possibilities in design and customization. You have more publishing option, SEO tools, Design Manager, and disable the public website choice until you fill confident to publish it again.
• Guest links: This give power to the users to share their documents, folders and sites with people inside and outside the organization and of course with the ability to revoke this sharing at any time they feel like it.

2. How do I structure my sites with SharePoint?

When building an intranet with SharePoint, a very important step is to decide the hierarchy of your site. There are many options of course, each with pros and con, but below you will find a few that seem to fit most of SharePoint users.

• Create a single site collection and use each department’s site as subsite to the main one. This way you only have one level below the homepage. It keeps the structure very clear to everyone and whenever you have to create a site for another department you just do it under the main homepage, keeping it simple and easily re-organisable.
• Create a single site collection, use each departments’ site as subsite and grow them according to function. Here you can have all the above benefits and also organize better by building your site according to department or function.
• Create a site collection for each department (Marketing, Finance, IT etc.). This option is although may seem like the most obvious one it might be a bit tricky. It is ideal for very large organizations with huge departments that are mostly independent in their work and barely have to communicate with the rest but smaller businesses that are all about communication might not find it that functional.

1. Am I following Azure best Practices?

Azure deployments can be quickly and easily optimized in terms of security, operational excellence, costs and performance with the use of Advisor. Make sure to try personal recommendations, target specific subscriptions and resources groups. Follow suggested actions as recommendations are prioritized based your tailored needs. There are many tools you can try to make sure you are following best practices like: Configure Advisor, Azure portal, Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), Advisor API, Azure Cost Management, Azure SQL DB Advisor, Azure App Service and many more.

1. Which data sources can I use with Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI can support many data connections. Some examples are: Flat files, SQL Database, OData feed, Blank query, Azure Cloud and Online Services. But apart from these you can also source data even from other platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook, Exchange etc. The choices are many and all you have to do is decide which ones you need for your business.

2. What are the main components of Power BI?

Power BI offers many crucial components that can make your life easier and your data more solid. Depending on what you want to do there is always a solution:

• Wish to extract or delete data from a wide range of different databases? Power Query
• Need to model or calculate complex or simple data? Power Pivot
• Want to visualize your data with blueprint? Power View
• What about visualization of your data in 3D mode? Power Map
• Need answers and solutions to your questions? Power Q& A
• Wish to build advanced queries, models or reports? Power BI Desktop
• How about creating report dashboard and sharing with others? Power BI Website
• Are you looking for an interactive view of your reports and dashboards? Power BI Mobile Apps

1. What are the main components of Power Automate?

As most Microsoft product, Powe Flow is well and strategically designed offering features and components that make work easier. Some of those components are and allow you to:

• Share flows as templates
• Deactivate various actions in flows
• Use AI builder to add intelligence
• Better connect flows to power apps
• Get support for simplified number formatting
• Create flows that use other solution components
• Export Visio diagrams
• Manage UI flows
• Connect with Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365 and Sharepoint
• Work with business process flows offline
• Support gateways in all environments
• Support change sets in Common Data Service

1. Why choose Power Apps instead of regular development?

It is obvious that both Microsoft Power Apps and custom development both have solid advantages. It’s up to each business to analyze its goals and abilities and choose which one suits their needs better. One of the main advantages of Power Apps over custom it should be its adjustability. Either you need a mobile or web app, Power Apps allow you to create mobile apps that run on Android, Ios, Windows and countless Internet browsers without the added costs. For the case of custom development you should prepare separately for each operating system and browser and spend more time and money. Not only that, but Power apps have a super user-friendly interface that allows drag and drop, customized colors, texts, fields, media, forms, screens etc. You get to connect to external data and once you are ready you can share with the rest of team or the whole organization. But the most exciting part probably should be that you don’t rely on tech department to do all that. It doesn’t require any technical background and anybody can easily learn to build apps.

1. What are the benefits of custom development?

Custom Development can show to the world that your business is unique and original. As described by it’s name it is custom made to serve your tailored needs and requirements. For those of you who are struggling to decide due to the costs should understand that it is a smart investment for the future. Due to its uniqueness and tailored design it helps increase employees productivity as they will be able to perform task quickly and more focused. A crucial factor is also scalability. As you grow you need your software should grow as well and be able to handle your new needs. Finally it’s more secure against external threats and in any case you have a support team that stay by for every step you make.