How Associations Benefit with Microsoft Blog Series: Teams
Why a system built on the Microsoft Platform is the right fit for associations. We’re introducing a new series about Microsoft features and how Altai Systems has adapted them for associations. Odds are that you – or someone close to you – is using Teams. That may not have been the case 18 months ago. Microsoft saw a growth of 233% of Teams users since April 2020. That’s right. Triple-digit increase from 75 million users in April 2020 to 250 million users in July 2021! Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella was not exaggerating when he said that we’ve seen ‘two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.’ But that’s old news now, right? You’ve been on Teams. You’ve adapted. You’ve embraced it. It’s changed how you work with your colleagues in real and tangible ways. But what if there’s more? Teams can extend beyond your internal communication. Associations are about collaboration. Sharing of content and information. Networking. Building a community. What better way to collaborate with your members than with the tool you’re already using to collaborate with your co-workers? And with Microsoft Teams you can do this. Everyone has different collaboration needs. Your Board or other leadership committees need extensive conversations and shared access to develop materials, discuss policy changes, or vote on action items. By extending the collaborating tool you’re already using to team up with your members, you’re eliminating one more distraction to your day with another tool. One productivity study showed 52% of workers’ time is spent dealing with distractions – including using multiple tools for meetings and searching for information from colleagues. By bringing your leadership into the Teams fold, your network of resources becomes centralized and less distracting. That’s where Altai can help make that connection even easier. Altai’s system is designed to leverage the data in your CRM to create automated workflows to populate designated Teams appropriately. Creating a new committee in your CRM to oversee your next annual meeting? We’ll create a Teams for it. A new term for your board of governors? We’ll add and remove members from the team based on their roles. Worried that these members aren’t in your Active Directory or don’t have a Microsoft email? No worries, Microsoft has solved for that. Community has become more important than ever in these evolving times. And that can mean different things to different people as we adjust to a ‘new normal’. But the days of not prioritizing online collaboration are gone. Online conversation, real-time document sharing and updating, and leveraging the tools your members are already using are here to stay. By turning to Teams for your collaboration tool, you’re not only extending the tool you’re likely already using – you’re extending the tool your members are likely already using as well. Talk about no learning curve needed! And to further entice you, here are just a few Microsoft Teams features you and your members will benefit from: Meeting recordings and transcriptions (Perfect for those minutes that your bylaws require!) Share an email to the Teams channel directly from Outlook (Whether you’re sharing a compliment from a satisfied member or troubleshooting a response to the latest fire you’re putting out, you don’t even have to leave your email.) Create tasks lists for your working committee (The organized team member will love this and the unorganized team member will quickly be a convert!) Move the conversation to breakout rooms (Has your committee turned into multiple subcommittees? You can still start and end in the same place and leverage the breakout rooms in between.) Speaking of breakouts, Teams has a channel for that. (Those subcommittees will inevitably last longer than just a breakout room session, right?) Set your status. (You want to be available, but maybe not always available? The Do Not Disturb status is your friend.) SharePoint creates your library of resources. (Libraries have been around for centuries because they work. SharePoint creates that library at your fingertips.) We’re committed to Microsoft Teams because it works. And we’ve built our integrations to our web portal and our platform to make it work for your association as well. Contact us to learn more about how Altai can personalize your Teams experience.
Altai Events: Using Microsoft Teams for Event Management
Microsoft Teams Integration with Dynamics 365 From Concept to Execution to Finance Have you considered that Teams can extend beyond meetings, or webinars to large scale virtual conferencing complete with sponsorships, virtual booths, multiple concurrent sessions, conference-wide or focused broadcasting, as well as multiple moderators and contributors? Microsoft Teams does more than simple chat, collaboration, video conferencing. Microsoft Teams has seen its daily active user count rise from 32 million in March to over 75 million by the end of April 2020. As an app available in the broader Microsoft 365 productivity bundle, Teams is available to all Microsoft 365 customers, it simply needs to be activated to start using it. Lately, Microsoft has been promoting big-name organizations that have been using Teams, which includes the NFL who used Teams to manage the Draft. In March, Microsoft reported that 91 of the 100 largest organizations, a staggering number, all use Teams in the workplace. That’s all to say that here at Altai we are big fans of Teams and use the app daily ourselves. One of the ways we love Teams is its functionality and ability to integrate. Our own team, spearheaded by partner, Mike Frye, has combined the powerful tools found in Teams, with Altai’s AMS built within Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. Together, we’ve created a powerhouse virtual event management tool for associations. Since associations and its members are already collaborating daily with teams, the end result of our integration is a seamless experience for your organization’s membership. In addition, registering for events, purchasing booths, and providing sponsorships are conducted within your member portal before publishing your conference. How it Works: High-Level Functionality The Altai Event Management systems allow users to manage webinars and events using an easy to use template and cloning application. Using the Event template builder you can click on an event or template and create a webinar or full-blown annual event and have it ready for registration in less than a minute. Altai’s event management platform manages the following: Easily creating the Event in the CRM Publishing the event to the web portal Enabling membership to register for the event. Creating the Event in Teams as a secure member portal Inviting the users to both the Team and the Teams Meeting Building a presenter’s area for session discussions, content, handouts, and collaboration Transcribing and indexing the session meeting once it is finished. “Community” enables the content. Security, content can be open or closed to nonmembers or only available to specific committees. Support for simple webinars or events with sessions, booths, committees, What Event Features are implemented/integrated with Teams? Automatically create an event site with member-specific security. Ability to manage many sessions. Ability to sell and manage vendor “booths” Ability to sell and manage sponsorships. Ability to enable broadcast communications to the sessions, booths, and members. Allow a member in securely and also block/remove them. Allow speakers and moderators to collaborate privately Allow registrants to see video content at a later date. (Coming Oct, but YouTube for now) Allow for the automatic transcription of the meeting. Ability to allow registrants to discuss and collaborate on content or session. The Altai Microsoft solution has all the features required to put on an event. Teams has a fantastic ability to allow those producing an event or a session to collaborate on the best ways to achieve this educational content and deliver it to the right members at the right time. What are the advantages of using Microsoft Teams? Today Microsoft Teams is the number one collaboration platform in the world. It is free with Office 365, and it has all the functionality you need to bring your members closer to your events and programs. Teams is perfect for learning and Teams is also very extendable. You can configure a webinar or event with over 200 apps that allow your members to learn and collaborate better. Here are a few of the features: Ability to invite members without paying a per-user license fee. A community can be built around the content. Extreme reliability and scalability. Today 75 million users log onto Teams daily. Not only does Teams automatically scale, but it is also ultra-secure. The content is captured forever and is available to the membership as an additional benefit and an additional revenue stream Security, you can control each portion of the event, the presentation, and the availability of that meeting to members at a very granular level. A very easy and familiar interface. Very flexible to extend and automate. One can automate any aspect of an event from registration to one-click wallet pay to automatic surveys to task management with only a few clicks.
