Written by Microsoft MVP Nick Cavalancia. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced the 2022 rollout of Mesh for Microsoft Teams as the next step in online and virtual collaboration. This seemingly bold step forward into a new type of interaction between individuals is more a natural evolution, taking years of augmented reality research and applying it in a way that provides value to organizations wanting to better collaborate.

Since early 2020, there has been a massive growth in the number of active Microsoft Teams users and organizations deploying Teams; now, there are more than 200 million monthly active users across the globe. With an increase in market share, it’s one of those applications that you either expect an organization to be already using or planning to deploy out to their environment sooner rather than later.

In recent years self-service has become an imperative for many businesses. Offering comprehensive self-service options like a customer knowledge base, chat, and community forums plays a huge role in the self-service success. And, maybe even more critically important is unifying those different support channels, so that requests are captured, processed, and responded to within a single system.

With Microsoft Teams usage continuing to increase, it was only a matter of time until we also saw the rise of Teams voice through PSTN. Even though this requires more expensive Microsoft 365 licenses, the return on investment can be significant purely based on the pricing structure but sizable savings can be realized when it comes to management overhead costs. However, it can be a challenge to ensure PSTN call quality for all your business lines and users.

Office 365 and Azure are two important cloud services with many features and functions. Although Microsoft mainly designed them to work separately, when used in combination, they offer an excellent way to increase efficiency in the workplace with minimal IT administration. This post will focus on the several ways organizations can benefit by using Office 365 and Azure together. It will also discuss critical considerations for administration, best practices, and pitfalls while using them together.