The world is going through a rough patch with most regions on some sort of a lockdown. As the pandemic is causing substantial disruptions to diverse industries on the planet, affecting their day-to-day business operations, many undertakings have realized the need to embrace flexible remote working contingency plans for communications and business continuity. Fortunately, few companies have successfully transitioned to work from home (WFH) culture to curb the spread of the outbreak and keep individuals safer. But most companies are still struggling to take their crucial operations online. Read our blog post to know how digital innovation is reshaping remote collaboration.
This post focuses on how you can swiftly transition to a virtual work environment by using innovative technologies and tools and create a complete digital workplace. Microsoft products and services, in particular, can help you to streamline your business processes in a remote work scenario while keeping remote collaboration and quality at the center. So, let’s explore some fascinating modern MS tools and platforms, which make remote communication and collaboration more convenient for internal as well as external teams, by going virtual.
Move beyond the network with customized business apps for stronger virtual collaboration
When time is critical and a solution is vital, you need to move beyond the typical network-based work environment and embrace the latest Microsoft solutions. Thus, in times of such a crisis, organizations across industries are shifting to a digital workplace utilizing cloud platforms, custom line-of-business (LOB) apps and automated solutions.
However, to empower next-gen ‘remote’ or ‘mobile-centric’ workforce, team collaboration via business applications has become the need of the hour for a virtual work culture. While Microsoft PowerApps implementation makes it easier for your enterprise to design your own business apps with no or low-code functionality, Power Automate and remote SharePoint services can assist you in process automation by leveraging multiple features of the Microsoft platform and Office 365.
“By the year 2024, approximately three-quarters of large organizations will be utilizing at least four low-code development tools.” – Gartner
Consequently, for stronger remote collaboration, effective business automation, better data visualization and reporting, you need to create custom apps based on O365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizing PowerApps and Power Automate services, which offer more capabilities with less dependency on standard enterprise software development. Though, to unleash remote teamwork with low-code apps that can be accessed easily via mobile devices, web browsers or Microsoft Teams, you may need to consult the right industry experts.
Respond to COVID-19 using advanced Microsoft products
With each passing day, the virulent outbreak is impacting more and more businesses across the world, driving them to respond strongly to it with advanced Microsoft remote collaboration products and services. As the outbreak has triggered an unprecedented demand for digital work environments, you must manage your business’ response to the terrible epidemic with innovative technologies.
The beauty of building your own business application using PowerApps is it enables you to build new capabilities and ensure that it is completely wrapped around your organization’s needs for effective and rapid remote collaboration and data management. Moreover, you can automate mundane business operations using Power Automate with simple point-and-click functionality for any cloud-based or on-premises application. Apart from this, embracing SharePoint for remote project team collaboration is like the icing on the cake.
Also, by leveraging PowerApps with the Microsoft Office family: SharePoint, OneDrive, O365, SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises, you can leverage its broad capabilities like connectivity, creating and sharing emails, contacts, lists, libraries, calendar, files and data from anywhere and any device.
Make the move to PowerApps, Power Automate and SharePoint
To manage your dynamic digital world of work where data is king, it is crucial for your business to have the three below-mentioned tools and services. Their applications are as follows:
1. PowerApps – Quickly develop business applications for mobile devices
2. Power Automate – Rapidly automate your business operations and workflows
3. SharePoint – Enable secure data/file sharing, workflow collaboration and content management
Within the Office 365 suite; PowerApps, Power Automate and SharePoint comes with fascinating features, which will help you to keep your digital workspace up and running with low-code business apps and include:
- Drag and drop interface for app creation
- Cloud-based services integration
- Workflow automation with over a library of 200 connectors
- Strong remote collaboration support
- Build secure workflows with low-code experience
- Close integration with Dynamics and Office 365 tools
- Easy app sharing and access it on mobile devices and web-browser
The other advantage of the powerful Office 365 suite is that you can also connect custom software and enterprise systems with O365 by developing third-party connectors which may not be a part of the suite. If you do not have the resources to pull this off, you can contact a Microsoft expert who will help you with this development.
Build your own crisis communication solution with the Microsoft platform
A global crisis arising due to the outbreak is severely disrupting several business processes across most industries. In response to the pandemic, Microsoft has recently launched a crisis communication solution to facilitate its internal team in collaborating remotely and to keep their remote workforce posted with the latest news and events about coronavirus.
Crisis communication is a low-code solution, designed combining the functionality of various Microsoft tools, including Microsoft Teams, PowerApps, Power Automate and SharePoint. It assists employees in the following ways:
- Team collaboration in a remote environment
- Report the status of their work
- Co-ordinate with administrators and share information
- Keep them posted about the condition related to outbreak via mobile, web or Teams as the app is integrated with RSS feeds from WHO
Also, some of the leading service providers are extending its support to build a robust crisis communication solution for a remote workforce by integrating with various Microsoft tools and services like SharePoint and several other third-party systems.
The good news
The advanced Microsoft app platform – PowerApps allows everyone, from first-line employees to professional developers, builds out-of-the-box, low-code custom LOB apps with mixed reality capabilities now, enabling modern businesses to digitize their workflows in a novel and innovative way. Additionally, integration of Power Automate with SharePoint and various third-party systems facilitates enterprises to automate business processes and rule-based tasks.
With the right set of tools, your organization can transform the way your remote workforce collaborates and connects with the internal team, enjoying the journey toward the virtual workplace today to position your business to grow, post COVID-19. If your organization requires a quick custom app and business automation solutions or gain secure access to shared digital assets, get in touch with us.
