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Craig discusses Microsoft Teams and other collaboration platforms.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Well, we went into our first collaboration product and now we're going to get into our next product. And this one is actually more of a team collaboration rather than just a video conferencing setup.

Really, as I mentioned, GoToMeeting's been around a long time, man. They'd have its pros and its cons and its pros really have to do with frankly how long it has been around because that makes it. More stable. Right? They've been addressing every problem. They've seen every problem in the last, my gosh, how long has it been for them? 16 years.

So Go To Meeting, a very, very stable product, something you might want to consider. I want to move into our next collaboration tool, which is Microsoft teams. Now, most businesses today are

[00:01:00] using a whole array of tools. And the reason I bring up Microsoft teams is that so many of us are using what's now called Microsoft three 65.

It used to be called office three 65, but now it's Microsoft three 65, which is a little bit misleading because office three 65, depending on which level you were on, gave you access to all of Microsoft office tools and where you could get windows as well, windows licenses, they pull it all under one roof and as would be expected from Microsoft or frankly, almost any company out there.

The price has risen and dramatically in some cases. So Microsoft three 65 has some inexpensive offerings we're talking just dollars per month, or if you're an actual business that needs to get something done,

[00:02:00] cares about having backups, cares about having an email with the proper email filters in place. And cares to have some of these collaboration tools. Well, now you're in the 30, 40, $50 per person per month range, which is pretty high when you get right down to it.

Not out of the ordinary, not just a totally out of the question, but it starts getting much more expensive there, including things like Microsoft windows licenses themselves. So you can really make sure all of your software from Microsoft is up to date and that you have the appropriate licenses for it because many of us, unfortunately, Just just don't have that. Right?

 What's one of the reasons that we're not keeping our software up to date. Well, one of the reasons that I've seen, again and again, is that Microsoft charges you in order to get an update in an upgrade. So.

[00:03:00] The first little bit of advice here is if you are a business, even as SO/HO, small office home office, make sure you get the enterprise versions of Microsoft three 65.

Typically those start with an E and I don't recommend anything less than an E three. And it goes up from there there's three and four and five and there's one and two and stuff. They change it frequently. So who knows this week, right? It might've changed and I didn't notice, but either three is where you want to start and that's going to give you access to all of the basic stuff that you need.

Now, typically we'll put a Cisco email firewall in front of Microsoft and their outlook and exchange servers. The reason for that is the Cisco email filters, just so much better than the stuff Microsoft offering. Plus you also can still

[00:04:00] use, and you still do use the Microsoft filters, but once they've gone through those incredible Cisco filters, those Microsoft filters, just frankly, don't add up to much, not much at all.

So that's what we normally do. But a lot of companies, they just stick with the regular Microsoft stuff. Now I get questions a lot of the time about Google and whether or not they should get to Google because Google has their Gmail, but they also have offerings for businesses. I have mixed feelings on that, but basically I say, no, don't use the Google tools.

Google has been decent at security. No question about it better than Microsoft that's for sure. Microsoft security is not their product. Let me tell you, but remember Google's product is you, even if you're paying them. They are watching your emails. They are selling that information and who knows whose hands it ends

[00:05:00] up in, even if it's supposedly anonymized.

That doesn't mean it's truly anonymous data. That data can be de-anonymized. We talked about that on the show before. So we're talking about Microsoft and if you already have a Microsoft license, like the older office three 65, or the newer licenses that are known as Microsoft three 65. You have the option of getting Microsoft teams and that's what a lot of people have done.

They're saying, Hey, listen, we're already using all this Microsoft stuff. We're just going to start using teams. Now I have to give kudos to Microsoft because they have come a long way. Their software was terrible for years, for a decade or more, just terrible. They would put every feature under the sun, into their software.

Not that it worked, but people, when they're doing a selection, they're not looking for what they want. They're trying to

[00:06:00] eliminate the things they don't want.

So if you're a vendor and you have some things missing in the mind of your prospect, You're not going to get that sale. It's just not going to happen. So Microsoft would throw everything, including the kitchen sink into their software. And most of them had a lot of bugs.

Now Microsoft still has tons of bugs, still tons. It's crazy. And those bugs drive me nuts. Sometimes it's like the moment we talked about at the top of the show, major, major bug in some of their software, that's supposed to keep your data secure, basically from hard disk crashes and from data loss and in fact is barely done the exact opposite.

So I'm not a big Microsoft fan, but they're tools that they've been developing more recently for online news. Have been a lot better than anything they've had before. I guess that's faint praise, right?

[00:07:00] Because what they had before was just so terrible, but anyhow, Microsoft has their teams app.

A lot of businesses that are already using Microsoft have said, well, we'll just use their Teams because you know, it's Microsoft and that's the employee they have used since day one, they tried to build up a name for themselves. They destroyed competitors by having people just waiting because they knew Microsoft is going to come up with something.

So we'll just wait and see because Microsoft announced something that not only did they not have in development, but apparently. We're barely even thinking about and just trying to put the competitors out of business and test the marketplace. Right? That's what it is. So where are you using this business today?

A whole bunch of different tools for communication and collaboration and Microsoft teams. It might be something not just for your business, but if you have a nonprofit or small family business, something you might want to

[00:08:00] look at. Because teams are designed to be collaborative and it does tie in a lot of Microsoft's other tools.

It allows you to deploy it company-wide and that can help to bring together employees.

Now it can also make it so that your employees can't get anything done because they're constantly getting notes and messages from other employees, but if your employees get some decent training and you kind of help them out that overload that can come with some of these teams tools, can basically go away.

So here are a few different ways that using a team tool could help out your business. One company-wide chat, which is kind of handy. It helps you to get your overall company message into the hands of all your employees. That's a very good thing. And that chat functionality is one of the main value adds of a team's application

[00:09:00] over something like Slack, that designed more for some typing back and forth. Or some of these other things like Go to meeting or Zoom that are designed primarily for you to hold a meeting.

All of the team's apps, Microsoft, and WebEx, both have. What's called threaded conversations. Now you'll see that in Slack where someone will make a comment in a channel, and then you can have a thread off of that comment. So that people that are looking through the channel or space or whatever it's called on the software you're using, don't have to see all of the comments about some main item that's in there. So threads that's important to have and Microsoft and WebEx teams both have that. Everything's recorded in one easy to find a place so that all of your conversations are right there in the channel. You know what they are, and you can find [

00:10:00] them. A WebEx team recently has set it up so that, yeah, everything is right there in that space, but it also has a separate set of tabs that let you look at just the files that were uploaded or just the meetings that took place in that space.

I love that about WebEx. There's no more digging through your inbox, looking for emails, or just all of a sudden there are 50 emails that come in because everybody had a comment on an email that somebody else sent. So you don't get that mail bomb when you're using these teams' apps. And that helps a lot making a, you know, a filter because we're so overloaded in all of our lives.

Now, your conversations in these team apps can take place as a team discussion, or you could have private chats or private meetings. It really, this changes everything. If you haven't used either Microsoft teams or WebEx teams,

[00:11:00] and there's the ability to integrate Skype, to have audio and video conversations.

That's true in Microsoft teams. If you're using WebEx teams, you have much better options. And we'll talk about those in, an upcoming segment here. let's see, I think the next segment. Yeah. Next segment. We're going to finish up a discussion about Microsoft teams. There are still a few more things we need to talk about.

We're going to also get into Zooms pros and cons. What can you use Zoom for? Why did I use Zoom? I still use it. And why? Both for marketing and for business and for family. So we'll talk about all of that and some other options that are out there that Google has.  Also, Apple has some just amazing things.

What you can use to communicate securely and privately all of that right here and [email protected]. Stick around.

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