By the start of 2022, Microsoft Teams officially declared that it has topped 270 million active users in its collaboration platform. With such meteoric growth, MS Teams is now the most popular business collaboration and communication platform, outperforming Slack and Zoom. Microsoft’s business messaging tool prides itself on its smart and team collaboration capabilities, such as integrations with other Office 365 applications like Outlook and SharePoint.

Meeting preparation is a tedious task. Administrators and secretaries alike have to use multiple applications to ensure successful structured meetings. Currently, several meeting platforms aid in meeting preparation, such as Microsoft Teams, which enables you to easily schedule meetings. However, meeting preparation also demands long hours of document consolidation and participants’ coordination.

Work meetings can be indeed very taxing to prepare and run. Despite this, they provide opportunities to collaborate, generate new and creative insights, and even add value to the entire company. With strong leadership and careful planning, ensuring every meeting is purposeful or productive is simple. To make your life easier, let’s take a deep dive into some essential meeting facts.

With its features that allow bringing together ideas and individuals, Teams has been regarded as a staple for organizations in the Microsoft ecosystem. As more businesses are relying on the functionalities of such an application, how secure is Teams for your teams? Organizing structured meetings in Teams may be vulnerable to some security hiccups, such as unwanted meeting access and information breakout with unorganized access controls.

Formal meetings in Teams become unproductive in the absence of ample preparation. Companies sometimes neglect the idea of meeting preparation and proceed with informal discussions instead, as it’s easier to just click the call button, compared to elaborate coordination and planning. As a result, follow-up meetings increase, which burns out the meeting participants.

Action items are one of the most crucial pieces of information that teams can generate from a meeting. It elevates meeting productivity in MS Teams as it translates the discussion items into achievable tasks. However, the simple to-do lists may be insufficient to track everything, from assignment to completion. Meeting organizers may need a meeting solution that can record and trace action items from meetings.

Ordinarily, the word “audit” can be unnerving, but it has a much more beneficial definition in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft audit logs capture data about any changes, such as when, where, and by whom activity took place, as well as the results of such activity. This helps ensure companies are doing everything they can in the event of a security breach, data loss, or simply during routine operations. Essential parts of the process are auditing and meeting trails.

In a corporate world increasingly dependent on teamwork, perhaps no innovation is as simple or valuable as document collaboration. With several people working on a single file, all without being in the same room, you can compose, modify, refine, and approve documents of all types rapidly and with as little risk of errors as possible.

It’s widely recognized that the future of work does not involve in-person office work or traditional nine-to-five working days. Instead, studies have shown that the options are limitless when building a working culture around individual needs, strengths, and preferences. But how can you build a successful team with a unique culture across time zones and locations?

Along with a wealth of technologies and products, Amazon has given the modern business world a range of innovative solutions to age-old problems. In the digital workspace, perhaps none better encapsulates this inventiveness than the Amazon 6-pager. This modern reimagining of traditional memos constitutes one of the best practices for hybrid meetings.