Since 2003, Microsoft has hosted Inspire, an annual conference for its partner community. Inspire is a great opportunity for Microsoft partners like Insiten to come together, share resources, and learn about what Microsoft has been working on. At Inspire 2019, Microsoft leadership – including CEO Satya Nadella – delivered a series of insightful and engaging keynote presentations. And based on what we heard, there’s a lot to look forward to.
The most exciting news we heard is about Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s business collaboration tool. We’re part of the 13 million (and counting) daily users of Teams and we’ve seen firsthand how valuable it is to an organization. Microsoft’s plan to place even more emphasis on Teams in the coming months is great news, and it demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to dethroning Slack as the go-to collaboration tool for businesses.
Teams helps us do everything from managing communication to file-sharing to project management, and a big part of that flexibility comes from Microsoft’s “Connectors” feature. With connectors, users can integrate external applications into individual channels within Teams. For example, you can integrate other Microsoft programs like Excel, PowerBI and Planner, add Twitter feeds, or use Dropbox as a team-wide document library, which adds up to a more holistic experience for the end user.
As developers of custom collaboration and analytics tools for specific, high value, niche or complex tasks, our goal is to make the end user’s life easier. Integrating our solutions with off-the-shelf products like Teams gives users the best of both worlds: the power of tailor-made applications designed to handle the heavy lifting, seamlessly integrated into the tools they already know and trust. As a result, teams and their leaders can spend less time learning and adapting to new applications and more time focusing on the big picture: making sure their processes are as efficient and impactful as possible.