Your enterprise can’t afford to let business and creative teams work in silos. Businesses must undergo a transformation to improve digital efficiency and collaboration between multidisciplinary teams in order to thrive.
Like many organizations, yours has likely gone through its own quest for an efficient team collaboration tool to streamline communication across teams. Over the years, collaboration software such as Slack, Trello, Yammer and others have attempted to make teamwork faster and more efficient.
But all of these platforms share a common pitfall: They require teams to incorporate yet another tool that lives outside their everyday programs, adding complexity and inefficiency to their workflows.
Digital transformation means connecting teams.
The ability to make data-backed decisions and quick, strategic pivots can be a competitive advantage over the competition — but only if your teams can communicate effectively and work efficiently to move projects from ideation to launch.
Toward that effort, Adobe and Microsoft have come together in a strategic partnership to help bridge the chasm between creative and business teams. With this new software alignment, the Microsoft Teams workspace becomes the hub for teamwork. Microsoft Teams allows for effortless collaboration across Microsoft applications, Adobe Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. Additionally, Adobe Sign will become Microsoft’s preferred e-signature tool.
The seamless integration of office and creative applications into the Microsoft Teams workspace enables all aspects of a project — from marketing briefs originated in Microsoft Word to creative assets chosen from Adobe Stock — to be easily collected, searched and discussed in one place.
Having this level of unified project management can help expedite productivity at the team and individual levels. For example, a project manager at a real estate company working on a presentation for a specific development project might need some assets. Rather than tapping a member of the marketing team to collect and share assets, such as business logos, renderings or site images, the project manager can source all of these elements within Microsoft Teams.
Everyone is responsible for the brand.
From making presentations to assembling and sending contracts, every asset your company develops is a representation of your brand. Because of this, everyone in your business has a stake in the brand. Providing easily accessible assets for all workers is essential to maintaining your brand integrity.
For creative teams, having readily available brand assets became possible with the introduction of Adobe Creative Cloud. The software introduced a built-in libraries extension to Adobe applications for global access. But this solution didn’t support the needs of business teams who work exclusively in Microsoft Office 365.
The integration of Adobe software with Microsoft Teams changes that, giving workers across the globe access to the same creative assets within their Microsoft Office applications. When everyone is responsible for brand and more teams are using imagery, access to images within Microsoft Teams workspace is a huge advantage.
Get a little help from a bot.
Intelligent automation processes and bots are gaining exponential value in the marketplace, both as efficiency tools for workers and as services to customers. According to TechCrunch, users who take advantage of Microsoft’s workflow automation service (Flow) or the Microsoft bot framework can incorporate these tools into Adobe Sign. Flow can automatically route new documents and track the approval process.
Adobe also has a bot to assist users. The Creative Cloud bot can be used to quickly locate assets directly within a Microsoft Teams conversation, or to discover new assets within Adobe Stock. The new bot may have limited capabilities now, but Adobe says this is just the beginning.
“Imagine a future where command-based bots in chat are replaced with AI-based creative assistants, capable of anticipating a team’s needs, automatically locating and suggesting assets based on the topic of conversation,” says Ashley Still, vice president of Creative Cloud for Enterprise and Teams at Adobe. “It’s just one example of the types of capabilities we’re exploring as we redefine the future of work.”
Work better, together.
Companies are always challenged to deliver great, personalized experiences to customers. To succeed at that, it’s imperative for teams to be on the same page at every corner. Using Microsoft Teams as your collaboration software means your teams can begin working together immediately without having to learn another platform. Plus, this expanded service within platforms your organization already uses means there’s no additional vendor contract or expense.
When projects evolve from complex management to intuitive collaboration, teams can focus on innovation and transform business outcomes.