It’s hard to talk about Microsoft 365 and not mention the elephant in the room: Microsoft Teams. As remote work and the “new normal” continue to drive business decisions and the way we work, Microsoft Teams continues to be at the center of these collaboration conversations.

With all the attention on Teams, it’s easy to forget about the rest of Microsoft’s massive suite of tools that also contribute to making work life — and in some cases personal life — a little bit easier. To help you start, I’ve put together a list of four of the most effective Microsoft 365 tools I use on a daily or weekly basis that help me keep a handle on my day. There are many tools in the product suite that can help here, and even some new ones (Microsoft Lists).

2020 has been an incredible year for Microsoft and especially for Microsoft Teams. With many organizations quickly adopting new ways for employees to work from anywhere, Microsoft Teams has seen a meteoric rise in usage for meetings and collaboration. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that by the end of April 2020, usage of Microsoft Teams had surpassed 75 million active users, a massive increase from the 44 million users reported the previous month.

One of the greatest assets of Microsoft Teams is that the platform is growing and adding new capabilities on a seemingly weekly basis. As organizations look for new ways to use the platform and further integrate Teams into their business processes, they will soon discover solutions for customized workflows, business process automation, direct integrations with Microsoft and third-party applications that provide a single pane of glass experience, and even industry vertical-specific functionality for supported tenants.

To help organizations discover some of these capabilities, I compiled a list of four unique use cases that organizations might consider for the next stage in their Microsoft Teams journey.

While we at CDW are in the business of providing IT solutions and services to our customers, behind the scenes we deal with the same operational issues that other enterprises face. Earlier this year, our leadership made the decision to close our offices and arrange for all non-essential CDW coworkers to start working remotely.

Over the course of a weekend, our Information Technology teams gained firsthand knowledge of what our customers were either already going through or soon going to be. It was a tall order to tackle the enterprise networking, storage, security, collaboration and communication needs to allow 7,100 coworkers to work from home, but our teams rose to the task. Now, we’re sharing our experience with our customers.

If your organization has made the strategic decision to enable Microsoft Teams, it is your job to accomplish this task while limiting the impact to end users, and also creating a path that will provide the best adoption and user experience possible.

The following are eight important things for you to consider as you start building your project plan for the move to the Microsoft Teams platform.

Microsoft isn’t retiring its Skype for Business Online solution until the summer of 2021, but we’re already seeing a growing number of organizations transitioning to Microsoft Teams. Businesses are finding that their employees really respond to an environment that ties together collaboration tools such as chat, file sharing, calendar, voice and video.

While it’s exciting to see users adopting a powerful tool on their own, it’s also important for organizations to be strategic in how they roll out and support Teams. Here are three ways to ensure your Teams deployment improves operations and helps your organization achieve its business goals.

In my tenure as a technical architect, I have witnessed a great evolution in collaboration business reviews. What once was simply reviewing system compute, versions and tickets is now so much more.

So what should organizations prioritize when reviewing their collaboration environments?