Effective business teamwork requires strong collaboration tools—especially when it comes to remote working environments where offsite employees have to work with office-based team members to get things done.
Microsoft’s Surface family of laptops, desktops, tablets, and digital whiteboard devices are all designed to help enhance business communication and collaboration. How do Microsoft Surface collaboration tools enable your teams to work better together, even when they’re miles apart?
Here are some of the Microsoft Surface features that help improve business teamwork for both in-office and remote working teams:
Microsoft Surface Feature #1: Built-in Microsoft Teams Compatibility
Each and every last device in the Microsoft Surface family of devices was built from the ground up to be used with Microsoft Teams.
What is Microsoft Teams? It’s a business communication and collaboration tool that combines group chat message boards, file sharing, and online document editing into one convenient and easy-to-use resource. Even the “basic” free version of Teams provides access to online versions of popular Microsoft Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Your employees can edit documents created in these apps simultaneously with one another instead of having to:
- Download a file;
- Make changes;
- Upload the edited file;
- Let the other employee know the edited file is up; and
- Repeat steps 1-4 again and again until the document is finalized.
With Teams online business collaboration, two (or more) employees can simply make edits at the same time and even send chat messages explaining their changes and what needs to be done. This saves hours on back-and-forth for editing important documents compared to the “traditional” method.
Microsoft Surface Feature #2: Standardized Screen Ratios
Regardless of whichever Microsoft Surface collaboration tool you choose to use, you can be sure that other Surface users in your organization will have a consistent view of whatever presentations or other materials you create on it. Every device in the Microsoft Surface family of products, from the ultra-portable Microsoft Surface Go and Pro laptop/tablet hybrids, to the whiteboard-sized conference room display of the Surface Hub 2S, uses a 3:2 screen ratio. This helps to ensure a consistent appearance for any graphics or presentations across all Surface devices.
This can help to enhance business teamwork by allowing remote workers to make presentations secure in the knowledge that the image on their display is identical to what the people in the office are seeing.
Microsoft Surface Feature #3: Secure and Stable Business Communication
Another benefit of Microsoft Surface devices being designed for use with Teams is that teams provides a stable and secure business communication platform. Even the free tier of Teams provides both region-based data residency (so you know your data isn’t in some unsecure data center overseas) and encryption for both data-at-rest and data-in-flight. This minimizes the chances of your business communications being intercepted and used for nefarious purposes.
Of course, even with the security features of Microsoft Surface collaboration on Teams, it’s important to practice good data hygiene—such as deleting employee accounts when said employees leave the organization and verifying recipients for sensitive files and information.
Microsoft Surface Feature #4: Improved Videoconferencing for Remote Working
Another important feature for Microsoft Surface collaboration is how these devices are designed to enhance videoconferencing capabilities. The Surface Go and Surface Pro both have small cameras and high-quality microphones to allow remote employees to easily videoconference with in-office team members.
In particular, the Surface Hub 2 makes videoconferencing better thanks to having a large display to show up to four incoming video feeds at once, an array of microphones for high-quality audio capture, and numerous speakers to provide clear and steady audio—minimizing the business communication obstacle of poor sound quality from grainy speakerphones.
Better videoconferences mean more effective business communication and teamwork—which leads to more productive teams.
Microsoft Surface Feature #5: LTE Connectivity for Remote Working
One of the biggest obstacles to effective business communication and collaboration is the need for a stable, secure, and reliable internet connection. This often leaves remote employees looking for cafés and other businesses with free public Wi-Fi connections. The problem with this is that these free access points are rife with opportunities for hackers to intercept and compromise your data.
This is where LTE connectivity on the Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Go can be an enormous boon.
LTE connectivity on these Surface devices allows employees who are working remotely to achieve internet access from virtually anywhere they can get a cell phone signal—removing the risk of relying on public Wi-Fi networks entirely. This also expands the area where remote workers can effectively collaborate and improve business teamwork for employees in the field. In short, Microsoft Surface collaboration tools are a must-have for any company with employees working remotely in the field where Wi-Fi connections simply aren’t readily available.
Microsoft Surface collaboration is poised to make modern businesses more effective at teamwork in a remote working environment than ever before. Are you ready to maximize your business communication and collaboration? Reach out to the team at Protected Trust to learn more!
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