The ability to quickly access information and communicate seamlessly from anywhere using any document or tool enables teams to work faster and smarter. With employees and departments working across different floors and offices (or even across the world), sharing ideas and staying in sync becomes simpler with an integrated productivity suite like Microsoft 365 for business (previously Office 365 for business).
An all-encompassing suite of collaboration tools that enable productivity more effectively than fragmented point solutions. When your team has the tools it needs to succeed and the tools seamlessly work together, everybody wins.
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We discovered what some of the top questions you were asking about collaboration are, and here are the answers.
Question: What collaboration really means?
Answer: Working together towards a common goal. Within business, there are many teams who need to collaborate towards a common goal, whether that's by delivering projects, services or products to your customers, working on internal admin or even when scheduling the Christmas party, if you're in business, then you are collaborating with your colleagues and externals individuals or organisations towards a common goal. |
Question: Why effective collaboration is important in business?
Answer: If you're not collaborating well and individuals are all taking different paths to arrive at a goal, there will undoubtedly be reworking, time wasting, lost information and potential resentment within the organisation or team, including potentially your customers. You would see this if your sales team didn't collaborate effectively with your delivery team and customers had to repeat their requirements; or you might experience two non-refundable venue bookings for the Christmas party if a key message or deadline was missed. |
At the end of the day, Good Collaboration = Good Business. |
Question: Which collaboration tool is best?
Answer: There are many collaboration tool for persistent information available at the moment, and most solve different needs. Zoom, Trello, Slack, Dropbox, Calendly, WhatsApp and tableau are all useful tools that aid in collaboration. But there is only one product suite that that answers all of these functionality and more; Microsoft 365 for business (previously Office 365 for business). For example; Microsoft Teams provides dedicated spaces for collaboration and a single pane of glass into all the other tools, and it integrates with any of the third party tools you might be using too; Planner helps to organize tasks across individuals to see in a centralized places; OneDrive and SharePoint replace your company document management and shared drives; Bookings lets you send a link instead of tagging back and forth for availability, Kaizala, Portals and Teams external access lets you collaborate with your customers and suppliers, sharing company information security; coauthoring in OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint means you can all access a single point of truth and collaborate in real time from anywhere; Power BI lets you visualize and make sense of company data to better facilitate reporting and tracking team KPIs. Learn more about the Office 365 suite of applications, or check out our Teams comparison to Zoom and Slack. |
Question: How improved collaboration saves money?
Answer: If an organisation is paying staff to spend time looking for documents, merging file versions from multiple emails, or chasing colleagues up for task updates, then it's wasting money. If improving visibility for tasks, documents or updates across a collaborating team can save staff 1.8 hours a day, it's a saving of $388,800 a year across 30 staff on an average income. |
“According to a McKinsey report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.” Source: Time Searching for Information, 2019.