Microsoft Teams Apps Logos on a pink background
By | Published On: 9 May 2024 |

Microsoft Teams has established itself as a pivotal hub for workplace collaboration, streamlining communication, and fostering teamwork across geographical and organisational boundaries. These Teams apps only add to this.

Microsoft has introduced several new collaborative apps into the Teams ecosystem, enhancing its functionality and significantly boosting organisational efficiency and employee engagement.

In this article, we will explore some of these innovations and their potential impact on your organisation.

 

1. SAP SuccessFactors: Simplifying HR Processes

Integrating SAP SuccessFactors into Microsoft Teams is a game-changer for HR departments.

By enabling employees to manage HR tasks directly within Teams, organisations can eliminate the cumbersome switching between applications, saving time and reducing friction. This allows your organisation to spend time on the work that matters, and not sieve through multiple tools simultaneously.

Key features such as HR task reminders and quick actions like time clocking or feedback requests are now integrated into daily workflows. This makes your processes more fluid and responsive to employee needs.

A computer with Microsoft Teams on the screen using SAP SuccessFactors.

 

2. GoBright: Empowering Flexible Workspaces

GoBright’s application brings innovative workplace solutions to Teams, enhancing the flexibility and efficiency of office spaces.

This app integrates with Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365, seamlessly managing meeting rooms, desks, and other resources.

Such integration ensures that changes are instantly updated across all platforms, preventing double bookings and optimising space usage, which is crucial for modern, dynamic work environments. This can also enhance your productivity levels by not having to create separate lists and staying on top of what’s going on in a large office.

A screen with a box in the middle demonstrating how to report an issue with GoBright.

 

3. Lucid AI: Streamlining Workflow Management  

Lucid AI’s addition to Teams enhances how teams interact with documents.  

By summarising complex flowcharts and diagrams within Teams, Lucid AI reduces the need for constant app switching, thus streamlining project management and planning processes. This works in conjunction with LucidChart within Microsoft Teams.  

This integration ensures that all team members are on the same page, literally and figuratively, enhancing alignment and efficiency. 

 

4. Miro: Bringing meetings to life

The Miro app for Microsoft Teams transforms brainstorming and planning processes by integrating powerful visual collaboration tools directly into the Teams interface.  

Miro is the online whiteboard platform that delivers a space for all the unstructured thinking, co-creation, and visual collaboration needed to help innovative ideas come to life. 

With the new Miro experience in Teams meetings, you can share-to-stage your Miro board and collaborate live with your teammates using facilitation tools like sticky notes, arrows, voting, timers and more to co-create easily in real-time without a context switch. 

Features like interactive brainstorming templates and voting systems encourage participation and creative input, which is vital for innovation-driven enterprises. 

You may have experienced Microsoft Whiteboard; this is an advanced version, and it has a phone app that is useful for on-the-go creation. It also has over 50 extra features, including widgets, visual workflow management, tagging, storyboarding, etc.  

Screen image of Miro and its Insights and Mapping possibilities.

 

5. Showmaster – Enhancing App for Presentation Dynamics

Showmaster’s app introduces dynamic elements like countdowns and animations to Microsoft Teams, elevating the quality of presentations and webinars.  

Such features engage audiences more effectively, making meetings not only more informative but also more memorable. 

At Changing Social, we commonly do webinars, most often once a week. This tool could be beneficial to us as we could use this to take our webinars to the next level by using a countdown till when our webinar starts and by making each slide feel like a well-edited video and not a PowerPoint slide. It adds pizazz to each section with ease. 

Showmaster within a Teams Screen.

6. Timeghost Company Contacts: Streamlining Contact Management

Timeghost centralises contact management within Teams, allowing employees to easily access and collaborate on contact details. By maintaining up-to-date information and integrating with Outlook and Microsoft 365. Timeghost enhances connectivity and communication efficiency within and across teams. 

 

7. Vantage Rewards: Fostering a Culture of Recognition

Integrating Vantage Rewards with Teams allows organisations to easily manage employee recognition and rewards.  

This app enhances visibility and engagement with company-wide recognition posts. This encourages a positive work culture and increasing employee motivation and satisfaction.  

Something else to advance this app further would be to invest in Viva Engage, as this takes communication and collaboration to the next level. 

For further applications that encourage work recognition, check out this article.  

 

8. 1Page: For Powerful Productivity

The 1Page application is an indispensable, all-encompassing productivity tool tailored for sales professionals.  

It seamlessly amalgamates data, insights, and connectivity to prospective and existing clientele into a robust platform.  

Enhanced by a Copilot plugin, the app facilitates access to streamlined data and real-time insights through conversational language prompts within the extensive Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Significantly elevating the efficiency and effectiveness of sales strategies. 

 

9. Alvao: Automation App for Operations

Alvao for Microsoft Teams revolutionises team productivity by automating routine operations, allowing team members to concentrate on pivotal projects.  

The recent expansion into Microsoft 365 applications means managing tickets via Outlook has never been more integrated.  

This application streamlines the logging of chat messages to tickets, organises them into easily manageable lists. Empowers agents with the capability to address and resolve tickets instantly, thus enhancing service efficiency and responsiveness. 

 

10.  Calm: Wellbeing focused work environment

Calm for Microsoft Teams brings the serenity and focus of the leading meditation, sleep, and relaxation app into professionals’ daily workflow.  

Therefore, integrated directly within Teams, Calm offers over 3,000 sessions, making mindfulness practices more accessible during the workday.  

This tool encourages personal well-being through features that allow individual or group participation in sessions, personalised content recommendations, and reminders to take mental health breaks.  

Fostering a culture of mindfulness helps individuals reset, reduce stress, and cultivate resilience, enhancing overall productivity and workplace harmony. 

Calm in Microsoft Teams.

 

How you add these Teams Apps 

If this article has intrigued you and you want to add these apps, this is how you do it. To execute this, you need to go to the navigation bar to the left of the main window of the Microsoft Teams screen.  

Microsoft Teams navigation bar.

At the bottom of the navigation bar, press the ‘+’, which will give you the entire range of apps. This allows you to download whichever app you would like. You will have to press the Add button to download.  

Before taking action on these instructions, you may want to check if this is accessible to your current tenant.

 

The Strategic Advantage of getting any of the Teams Apps

Integrating any of these ten apps into Microsoft Teams addresses various operational pain points, from HR and space management to project collaboration and employee recognition.  

By reducing app-switching, streamlining communication, and enhancing data accessibility, these apps empower employees to work more efficiently and effectively. 

For organisations already leveraging Microsoft Teams adopting these collaborative apps represents a significant step towards building a more connected, efficient, and innovative workplace.  

We use many apps at Changing Social to enhance our work culture, which supports us daily and our procedures.   

Integrating such versatile functionalities within a single platform is beneficial and essential for staying competitive in the fast-evolving business landscape. 

 

If you would like to find out more about how Microsoft Teams. And how it could help develop your business communication and collaboration, please don’t hesitate to book a call with us by pressing the green “CONTACT” button to the right of the screen! 

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