News About Mitel, Microsoft Teams, Poly and Slack
Unified Communications News Roundup 21st to 28th of September 2019
September might be ending, but a new wave of evolution in the Unified Communications and Collaboration is just beginning. This week, we've had plenty of exciting news stories to talk about, from various Comms companies making their way into the Forbes 100, to the arrival of a new Slack online classroom.
In case you missed it, we’ve just launched UC Advocates which is our new social advocacy initiative. If you’d like to know more visit https://ucadvocates.com – webinar dates have just been announced so it’s not too late to register your interest.
As usual, if you didn't have a chance to read through all of the content available from UC Today this week, don't panic We've rounded up some of the top stories to keep you ahead of the curve.
10 UC Companies Make the Forbes 100
As the age of digital transformation continues to change the way that we live and work, publications all over the world are celebrating some of the leading companies driving us into the future. Recently, Forbes released its list of the top 100 companies in the cloud. We were thrilled to see a number of communications, collaboration, and customer experience brands earning the top spots.
Not only did organisations like Intercom and Monday.com appear on the Forbes list, highlighting the value of collaboration tools, but we saw Dialpad, Fuze, Talkdesk, Pindrop, and many others too. Check out our recent article on the top ten comms companies to make it into the Forbes Cloud 100 to learn more.
Will the Cloud Block Out the Sun for Channel Partners?
For many people, the cloud is an exciting opportunity. It's a chance to experiment with new and evolving technology in a more agile environment, and a fantastic way to keep costs to a minimum as your business changes. However, there are some challenges to consider with the cloud too. For instance, channel partners are quickly beginning to see threats in the cloud environment.
These days, it seems as though if you can't adapt to cloud quickly and create a point of differentiation that speaks to your audience, you could risk losing your entire customer base. I spoke with Colin Mann, the UCaaS cloud marketing director at Mitel, here's what he had to say.
Three Bright Ideas in Microsoft Teams
Looking for a quick way to improve productivity in your workforce? A collaboration tool like Microsoft Teams is likely to be a good start. Not only is Microsoft Teams one of the most popular collaborative tools on the market today, but it's also constantly adding new feature and functionality to the mix to improve the way that people work.
Recently, our own Moshe Beauford reported on three new Microsoft Teams features that could improve organization-wide productivity instantly. These three features include the Teams conferencing capability, the MS Teams Priority Chat offering, and the MS Teams email client.
Poly Continues to Optimise UC UX
Plantronics and Polycom came together not so long ago to deliver an enhanced offering in communication and collaboration tools to today's workers. 6 months on from this iconic merger, Poly is leading the way to a brighter future with updated opportunities for state-of-the-art customer experience. Our Maya Middlemiss spoke to the EMEA channel director, Paul Dunne, to discuss the work that Poly has been doing to update the environment.
The conversation covered everything from "optimisation at the edge," to how we move to the next step in conferencing. According to Poly, the three key components of collaboration involve Bricks, Bytes, and Behaviour. You can learn more about these crucial elements in our latest article here.
Learn and Grow with Slack
Finally, Slack returned to the top of the headlines again this week when it announced it's new solution for people trying to introduce workers to collaborative tools for the first time. Even in today's highly digital age, there are still many employees that struggle to get the most out of their workplace environment, simply because they don't know how to make the most out of the latest tools.
Slack's new online classroom teaches complete beginners how to access the features of Slack that will help to make them more efficient and productive every day. It's an excellent introduction to the wonderful world of virtual collaboration, from the company that helped to introduce the world to collaborative tools as we know them today.
There you have it - a selection of amazing stories from the last week. What was your favourite? Let us know by joining the conversation on social media today!
UC Trends 2020
Watch out in October our annual trends and insights series starts, this year we visited the leading execs in their home towns across America’s Silicon Valley – stay tuned, the video interviews are not to be missed!
Rob Scott - Publisher @UC Today