In the Modern Workplace, seamless integration between the tools your employees use most is vital. Empowering people to stay in their workflows – while integrations take place in the background – maximizes productivity and creates a positive employee experience.
Microsoft Teams, for example, has become indispensable at many organizations to keep work moving wherever it happens. But it can’t always accommodate collaboration with external partners, integrate with enterprise content repositories, or connect with crucial business processes.
With the right integrations, employees can stay productive in their preferred applications for internal or external collaboration. They don’t have to worry about whether enterprise data is secure and stored properly because, when stored in context, the predefined business rules automatically protect and govern the content, ensuring employees can access the information they need in the context, when and where they need it.
Understanding the pitfalls of collaborating without integrating
Over the last couple of years, most organizations have adopted new collaboration technologies for the Modern Workplace. Microsoft Teams recently reached more than 270 million monthly active users, up from 75 million in early 2020.
But there’s a downside to its widespread popularity: like any productivity application, it can turn into an information silo. Without meaning to, employees often create micro-repositories on Teams.
There are also limits when it comes to collaborating with people outside the organization. Companies in complex industries have multiple external partners that need to access certain enterprise information for efficient collaboration. Without securing licenses for everyone, however, this is impossible without integration.
Keeping track of where information lives and who has access to what can be challenging, potentially creating compliance issues. Asking busy employees to perform manual content management tasks such as adding metadata, classifications, and retention labels for Teams content is simply unproductive. Not only does this approach diminish the employee experience, but it also increases the chance of errors and data loss.
Connecting content with business processes
Employees need a single interface where they can get work done, in context. If they’re in Teams, they want to see relevant information from lead applications like SAP and Salesforce. No switching, report queries or other actions required.
This deep integration empowers people to make data-driven decisions quickly and easily. When employees can instantly get the information they need in their preferred interface, no matter where that information resides, productivity naturally increases.
Integrating content in Teams with key business processes also reduces risk by automating content management tasks. When it’s added to the business workspace, the Teams content automatically inherits the appropriate classification, metadata, and security.
OpenText™ Extended ECM integrates the most widely used business systems with Microsoft Office 365, enabling employees to maintain efficiency in their familiar applications while keeping information controlled, secure and compliant from creation to archiving and disposition. It automatically manages transcriptions and other content stored in Teams, completing your governance strategy.
Simplifying collaboration with synchronization
Collaboration gets complicated when organizations are working with several external partners on different facets of a large project or managing multi-layered supply chains. To keep things simple and maintain a single source of truth, OpenText™ Extended ECM for Microsoft® Office 365 offers content synchronization with Teams.
Team members can choose to edit content in their business application or in Teams. Either way, all the changes get synced back to the relevant business workspace, which applies the correct permissions and protections.
Every step of the collaboration is automated and template-driven, allowing users and administrators to focus on their work without having to set up Teams, Workspaces, integrations or shares. When the collaboration process ends, the Team can be retired and made read-only.
Taking Teams integration to the next level with voice
As more and more employees rely on Teams as a collaboration platform, organizations have started to adopt Microsoft Teams Phone. While this transition tends to be slower than the adoption of base Teams functionality, since large enterprises often have entrenched phone systems spanning multiple locations, organizations are still making the move to more modern voice solutions.
Instead of completely replacing their existing phone systems, some companies are interested in trying out Teams Phone in phases. But they’re held back by legitimate concerns, most notably problematic call routing across the entire organization, disparate messaging systems and message compliance. Customers want centralized phone numbers that can route across the entire enterprise – regardless of the phone system used by each location, for example – or the ability to record and send company-wide voice messages to all office locations.
With OpenText™ CX-E Voice, organizations can implement Teams Phone while keeping their existing internal phone system and call center investments. The full integration means employees can make and receive calls through Teams while benefitting from CX-E’s unified messaging, voicemail, transcription, AI-powered automated attendant and more.
CX-E acts as the central answering point for the entire network of phone systems, routing calls seamlessly and enabling crucial voice messages – think a CEO pep talk – to reach every employee with ease. For companies in regulated industries, CX-E provides secure end-to-end voice messaging.
Limiting disruptions to everyday tasks
Extended ECM and CX-E remove the extra steps and workflow disruptions that can come with using multiple tools with multiple partners. Like every good integration, these solutions operate invisibly to secure and manage information while putting it in the right context for users.
Today’s knowledge workers already manage relentless distractions and demands. Powerful integration between their preferred tools eliminates time-intensive manual content management while boosting productivity and collaboration. It’s employee empowerment at its best!
