Top 10 Apps that integrate seamlessly with Teams
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Date: November 2021
How to do more without leaving the Teams environment
Microsoft Teams is one of the most powerful collaboration solutions available. Even so, it’s not uncommon for organisations to be using other software in their day-to-day activities, too, and switching between those and Teams to get things done.
Switching, however, can be time-consuming and jarring for the user. Studies have shown that this can lead to a drop in productivity and contributing to burnout among workers as they constantly adjust their minds to different application interfaces many times in a day.
Fortunately, many of today’s popular business applications integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. What this means is that workers can do what they need to do inside one application interface, without needing to open other apps. The boost to productivity has proven invaluable to the organisations that have adopted this approach.
In the spirit of helping your organisation to do the same, here are ten of the most popular applications that offer Teams integration. Say goodbye to frustration and burnout, and hello to seamless productivity and happier staff!
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Smooth integration with Microsoft Office straight out the box contributes greatly to the popularity and increasing adoption of Microsoft Teams.
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 takes this even further, offering users a tab that can be added into Teams channels. This grants access to helpful collaboration functionality that lets team members work even more closely with one another.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration into Teams, workers can:
- Co-create all Office documents
- Make use of a cross-functional collaboration hub
- Have easy access to all documents shared across teams
External Connections to Slack or Webex Teams
Installing this software will allow your people to stay in Teams while talking to their external contacts on those other platforms (most likely either Slack or Cisco Webex Teams).
Simply put, this “external federation” by Mio translates messages sent between platforms, allowing for incredibly convenient communication even when both parties are using different chat applications.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Outsourcing tasks like marketing, image creation, and website layout to remote teams is quite popular these days, but it can slow the approval process down.
Through the Adobe Creative Cloud app for Microsoft Teams, it’s possible to remove those barriers to speedy approvals.
Close integration of the app with Teams allows creatives to share their work quickly, and managers to provide feedback and approvals faster than before without leaving the Teams environment.
Wrike
Teams in an agile environment get a lot of benefit from Wrike, a popular online project management tool.
Wrike features extensive integration with Microsoft Teams that allows users to create and manage tasks inside Teams conversations and send and receive comments that appear in Wrike.
With Wrike integrated into Teams, users can:
- See real-time progress on projects coworkers are contributing to
- Send actionable notifications in Teams chat
- Access project schedules laid out on a shared Gantt chart
- Use a single sign-on to access both applications
Polly
By integrating directly into Teams, survey software Polly makes gathering feedback on any topic smooth and easy.
It can be used to solicit feedback with polls and multiple-choice questions, allowing managers to get the answers they need without disrupting their teams.
Polly offers:
- Fast access to responses to important questions
- Multiple choice or freeform polls
- Analytics and insights in real time
Polly is one of the best ways to get the feedback management needs from their workers via Microsoft Teams, without disrupting anyone’s day.
SignEasy
Getting signatures on vital documents is arguably one of the most important parts of business administration, and Teams integration with SignEasy by Glykka makes this as simple as it can be.
With SignEasy, team members can legally sign forms quickly without downloading any software or being physically present in the office – a useful ability in these times of remote working and social distancing.
SignEasy lets staff do the following in Teams:
• Annotate and edit forms and documents in real time
• Add important details when signing (dates, names etc.)
• Sign popular document formats like Word, PNG, Excel, and PDF
Lucidchart
The value of visuals when it comes to design, organisation charts, website wireframes and more cannot be overstated.
Lucidchart, an app whose byline is “Diagrams Made Easy”, is one of the best ways to enhance the productivity of teams that are driven by aesthetics and visuals. It offers a range of diagramming options that make it easy to visualise ideas, workflows, charts, and more.
With tight integration into Microsoft Teams, any of your workers can use Lucidchart to bring their ideas to life, without leaving the Teams environment.
Among many other diagramming features, Lucidchart offers:
- Drag-and-drop visual editing
- Links and layers for interactive diagrams
- Presentation mode for slideshows
Mural
Do you often need to brainstorm with your remote teams? Mural is a great way to do this in Teams as it creates a custom channel that lets you easily organise and execute brainstorm sessions.
It offers whiteboarding functionality with a messaging extension that lets your team(s) message each other at the same time, as well as an intelligent notification system that notifies you when you’re invited to a Mural or brainstorms are updated.
ApproveSimple
Approvals are an integral part of any project, and not getting them in time can cause delays and lead to project overruns.
Having the ability to see all items that need approval and to action them in Teams is an excellent way to keep project momentum up.
This is what ApproveSimple does: it consolidates approvals from multiple environments inside Microsoft Teams and makes the process both easy and simple.
For instance, it is much easier to approve or deny items when they are presented in one seamless interface, as ApproveSimple provides inside Teams. You can also manage leave requests there, as well as track invoices and purchase requests. Easy!
ScrumGenius
The Scrum framework is intended to make teams more agile by helping them to work together more effectively by leveraging adaptive solutions for complex problems.
ScrumGenius integration with Microsoft Teams is an excellent way to automatically pull all information Scrum Masters need into a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Use it to automate daily status meetings, check in with staff, facilitate retrospectives with all stakeholders, and verify the emergence of empiricism inside your engineering standards to ensure they fit your product backlog forecasts.
Let Tarsus On Demand help
If you want to integrate any of these applications and their functionalities into your Teams environment, or you’d like to get started on Teams if you don’t already have it, you’re welcome to speak to us!
Drop us a line and one of our experts will be in touch with you soon to start the conversation around how best to go about it.