October 28, 2020: Today we announced that Microsoft Teams reached 115 million daily active users (DAU). This growth reflects the continued demand for Teams as the lifeline for remote and hybrid work and learning during the pandemic, helping people and organizations in every industry stay agile and resilient in this new era.

Source: Microsoft Blog

Accelerating Digitalization — Team SwiftAnt’s Viewpoint for Enterprise integrations, that impact everyone in the Organization.

Key point to this discussion is how are businesses leveraging Microsoft Teams? Our observation is that many of them are using it as a collaboration platform with primary focus on messages, video calls and meeting rooms. These capabilities existed since early 2000s in many forms, so we started asking what is so great about using Microsoft Teams. Some answered that as MS Teams is integrated with Office 365 and hence the usage is easier.

SwiftAnt’s viewpoint: Most organizations are not leveraging the Microsoft Teams platform to its true potential. Using Microsoft Teams for messages, video calls and meeting rooms is very basic, and it can do much more than that. Enterprises and SMB (Small and Medium Businesses) can leverage Microsoft Teams for end to end integrations & automations across all support functions like:

· HR functions management with self-help bots’ integration

· Innovation Platform, unleashing the human potential

· IT service desk, self-help functionality before seeking the intervention of helpdesk personnel

· Workflow approvals and authorizations

· And much more, as Teams is a platform that can be used for integration with any automation platform like Power Automate & any API enabled platform.

People have transcended the use of pocket phones to unprecedented scales from basic functionalities like calling, SMS etc. to banking, watching movies, booking tickets etc. Likewise, Organizations can unlock value from MS teams and make it a one stop shop from just collaboration and meetings to a platform for Enterprise integrations, self-help, innovations and beyond.

We are sharing few scenarios with you to ignite your thoughts:

· Scenario 1: We at SwiftAnt use Teams as the platform for all HR functions integration, like querying about HR Policies, Employee leave management, expense reporting, employee referrals — all with the help of few lines of code and integrating LUIS, Bot Framework, and a mini Cosmos database. Key benefit we derived is that HR personnel can now focus on value added functions than performing the routine tasks. Employees are happier with self-help bots’ vs getting answers from humans for routine questions.

· Scenario 2: Automation of the workflows; many businesses have sophisticated ERPs, however, there still exist the workflows that fall outside the purview of ERPs and such workflows are typically managed via emails. One such example is approval of Board’s quarterly meeting minutes. Scenarios like this can be easily integrated with Microsoft Flow integration with Teams. Once again, a very simple integration for a very rarely used but a key function of the organization.

· Scenario 3: Simple self-help for routine IT helpdesk scenarios… many times, IT helpdesk gets called for routine issues like VPN not working or Email issues. Leveraging LUIS and Bot Composer, we implemented self-help platform on Teams, and we noticed 40% reduction in calls to IT helpdesk. For less than one week’s implementation, the ROI is quite impressive.

· Scenario 4: There cannot be a better utilization than unleashing the human potential. We designed and implemented an ideation platform for employees to share ideas for continual improvement of the business. Initial results are very encouraging, and we will share more information in next few months.

Start enjoying Microsoft Teams by leveraging its true potential.