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Why Organizations Recognize EPC Group's Consulting Services as the Industry Leader
EPC Group wrote the book on SharePoint & Power BI
Microsoft Partner for 25+ Years
Over 4 million Office 365 users successfully migrated
200+ years combined senior team migration experience
Expertise migrating to Office 365 in every vertical
EPC Group's Chief Architect Errin O'Connor was on the original SharePoint and
Office 365 Beta teams

What Exactly is Microsoft Teams?

Teams is a chat-based collaboration platform that is part of the robust suite of Office 365 services and is truly built for today’s workforce in mind. Teams provides global, remote, and dispersed teams with the ability to work together collectively and share information in a central common place. It allows organizing chats by teams (projects) and various channels (different topics / audiences that comprise a team).

You can leverage excellent new features like document collaboration and one-on-one chat, team chat, and more. Microsoft Teams is also fully integrated with Office 365 services, such as Skype, SharePoint and Exchange.

Microsoft Teams provides a versatile conversation / chat experience. You will be able to enjoy threaded conversations that automatically become information assets that are saved. These assets are searchable through Microsoft Graph. These conversations can become visible to everyone on your team, but you do have the option of launching private discussions in Teams.

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Bringing Teams Together

Transform your collaboration with easy, affordable and appealing phone systems for organizations of all sizes. EPC Group and Microsoft work together to provide you with the simple and affordable connectivity wherever you are, so your team can all work together as though they were in the same room.

Microsoft Teams Voice Phone System for Office 365

Do you need native Microsoft Teams capable phones but need to purchase these phones asap? No problem, EPC Group is a certified Microsoft Teams phone supplier. Contact us to discuss your options.

EPC Group and Microsoft are long-term partners that are committed to ensuring your virtual meetings are equipped with the appropriate voice solutions. The high-quality voice and video-interoperable solutions that EPC Group can provide work seamlessly with Microsoft Teams and are designed to allow your teams to connect easily. EPC Group safeguards your investments by providing video and voice conferencing equipment that work easily with your existing and future Microsoft collaboration applications.

Phones for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams supports a portfolio of desk phones for users who require a traditional phone experience. To get the latest and up-to-date information on Teams certified devices, go to Teams Marketplace.

Microsoft Teams Certified IP Phones

To deliver a high-quality and reliable Microsoft Teams experience on phones, we are partnering and actively working with Yealink, Crestron, Poly and Audiocodes to develop and certify a wide portfolio of desk phones and conference room audio devices. See certified IP Phones for currently supported devices.

The Expert Team You Need

Our architects, technicians and consultants have decades of combined experience, dozens of Microsoft certifications and broad expertise in network assessment, implementation, user adoption / change management, training, 24/7 support, and managed services. The EPC Group team has extensive expertise in migrating customers and supplying the right hardware for Microsoft Teams integrations. We are here to ensure your investment in modern business communications deliver real business benefits and provide the return on your investment your expecting.

As the fastest growing application in the history of Microsoft. Microsoft Teams comes with all Office 365 Enterprise plans and most Office 365 Business plans. Businesses that leverage Office 365 are able to change over to MS Teams with their built-in robust cloud-based voice application.

EPC Group having over 23 years of experience of supplying,  integrating and developing Microsoft-based PBX systems and having implemented thousands of PBX systems, we have developed a strategic, methodical strategy to guarantee that with each and every project we engage in that we offer an easy drama-free transition over to the MS Teams Phone System.

Summary

The Microsoft Teams Phone System allows organizations to change their current PBX system with a suite of unified phone system features closely integrated with Office 365 and delivered within the trusted Microsoft cloud.

The Microsoft Teams platform also has a cost effective built-in intelligent call routing system.

Companies can now freely move to the Teams Phone System by adding the applicable Office 365 licenses, many of which are already included with Office 365 Enterprise plans.

Business Perks of Moving to the MS Teams Voice Phone System
  • Combined within Office 365 & MS Teams
  • Smooth, business-wide call routing
  • Powerful solution that supplants on-premises PBX systems
  • Improved contact center applications
  • One application for easier solutions and support

Core capabilities included in Teams:

Chat

Conduct public and private conversations with your teams. The robust integration of Skype video into the application allows you to leverage social features, such as adding emojis and custom memes to your discussions.

Hub

Teams offers a common shared workspace for various applications including PowerPoint, Excel, Word, SharePoint, Planner, Power BI and Delve. This feature gives you and your teams the option to work natively without the cumbersome process of toggling between applications as you try to get your projects finished.

Skype for Business to Teams Migrations:

As a part of Microsoft’s effort to cutdown the number of tools to do similar things within Office 365, Microsoft Teams is now at feature parity with Skype for Business. This is a significant milestone indeed, because it means that organizations are able to now switch to the newer platform without having to sacrifice their favorite features.

Microsoft Teams is not just a unified communication application; it’s a collaboration tool with a window into other apps and services. This is the reason that many refer to it as an app hub. What this effectively means is that Microsoft Teams is a “Super App” for people to communicate, collaborate, and ultimately work.

Think of it this way, Microsoft Teams adds an extra thin layer of functionality on top of Office 365 Groups giving users access to SharePoint Online, Planner, OneNote, site functionality and others.– This is a big deal.

Adopting Microsoft Teams effectively means that businesses are implementing SharePoint & OneDrive even if they haven’t deliberately done it yet. This is due to the fact that the file storage of Microsoft Teams is delivered by SharePoint & OneDrive.

So why doesn’t Microsoft just come up with an upgraded version of Skype for Business? Because Microsoft doesn’t just want to see you upgrade another app. Microsoft is more interested in changing your behaviors around email, file shares, attachments and switching between various applications, thus literally changing the way you work and making you more efficient.

So, whether you are ready or not a Microsoft Teams adoption is inevitable.

The most important step next is Governance and How to set up a Microsoft Teams Governance strategy that meets the needs of your organizations.

Slack to Microsoft Teams Migrations

Businesses across the globe are moving into a more digital workplace and graduating from an email-based to messaging. With this you enjoy benefits like greatly reducing the number of emails that clog up your inbox as well as losing emails and productivity.

Your project teams will no longer need to spend time with unnecessary ad-hoc meetings or status reports as everyone is kept up-to-date with the project status from the conversation history.

These messaging platforms are great productivity applications,but the question is which application are you using currently? If the answer is Slack, you may have a problem as Slack is not completely integrated with your wider content and collaboration platform being that it operates in more of a silo. Also, the licensing cost for Slack is much more than Microsoft Teams when comparing the benefits and features between the two tools.

If you have already subscribed to Office 365 you now have a great alternative for Slack with Microsoft Teams. Here are a few reasons why we think migrating from Slack to Microsoft Teams is your best play.

Microsoft Teams advantages over Slack

Are you paying twice as much as you should?

If your organization is already in Office 365, its time to leverage teams. Microsoft teams provides a true messaging platform for teamwork and gives the opportunity to create a more open, fluid, and digital environment. Teams supports more than 18 languages and has all the features that come with Slack.

Slack has extremely high licensing costs which you are paying separately, whereas Teams is within Office 365 suite.

One Repository

Microsoft Teams files are stored in SharePoint sites and OneDrive.This provides a much stronger search result and reduces duplicate content.

Enjoy a unified user experience with other Office 365 tasks

Microsoft Teams is within the Office 365 licensing family and enjoys the infrastructural security, compliance support, Information Protection (DLP) and auditing that comes standard with Office 365. Also, any Teams conversations and files are accessible through an Office 365 search. Teams also includes support for:

  • Document Versioning & Co-Authoring
  • Video and Audio Support for communication
  • Content highlighting with Teams tabs

A few things you should know about Teams

Bots and Functionality

About 24 AI bots you can communicate with and a variety of functionalities are available to help increase productivity. These artificial intelligence applications can complete tasks using chat-based commands.

Examples of Bots:
T-Bot – Can answer basic frequently asked questions about Teams.
Polly Bot – Allows for polling co-workers.
Growbot – Allows you to exchange kudos with your co-workers.
Statsbot – Delivers scheduled reports via sources such as Salesforce and Google Analytics.

Robust Meeting Experience with Scheduling Capabilities

Teams was constructed to leverage the maximum capability of the Microsoft Graph, your workgroups and teams will now have the ability to share insights, intelligence, and data anywhere within the Office 365 suite.

The ability to meet virtually is an important and cost-effective feature for businesses today. Teams gives you a view of your scheduled meetings, with particulars like who will be attending, the time and subject of the meeting.

Extremely Customizable / Benefit of Connectors

In this day and age, customization is an important feature for any application. If your trying to increase engagement within your organization look no further – Microsoft Teams has you covered.

You can tailor this platform to meet all your unique business and cultural needs of your organization. Teams gives you a platform with options for extensibility and open APIs with general availability. Through the leveraging of Microsoft Exchange’s Connector model, Teams can provide you with updates and notifications from third-party services like Twitter or GitHub. With added support for Microsoft’s Bot Framework, your organization will be able to create and customize the applications that integrate with Microsoft Teams.

Mobile Audio & Video Capabilities

Available on both Android and iOS, Teams provides an easy-to-use app that allows you to chat with your team via text, have a voice conversation or conduct video meeting.

Channels & Tabs

Channels are a great innovative feature that work like a dedicated distribution list for a subset of players within a team. They minimize silos and improve transparency within team communication. At the moment all channels share the same security as the team, but private channels with unique security may be an option in the near future.

Advanced Security

Security is another area in which Microsoft Teams stands apart. You’re always provided with cutting-edge security and compliance capabilities when you use any of Office 365’s services. Your data is encrypted while in transit and at rest. Teams is also a part of Microsoft’s global network of data centers which is said to have a transparent operational model. Your Teams account is provisioned within Office 365 and managed via the Admin console.

While chats occur within channels, Teams also allows you to add Tabs to other properties. You can connect to different things like documents, a SharePoint site, external website or Power BI report etc. Once added, Tabs are displayed at the top navigation of each Channel.

EPC Group's Teams Deployment and Migration Services

Our deployment and migration services support all technologies, capabilities, and features currently available for Microsoft Teams along with any upgrades and feature enhancements to ensure our clients are offered the best and latest in Microsoft Teams and Office 365.

EPC Group will provide your organization with:
  • End to End Deployment and Migration Services including Implementation Requirements, Planning Considerations, Permissions, Microsoft Teams Provisioning, Testing, Installation, Setup and Administration.
  • Understanding of the Integration with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, One Drive for Business, OneNote and Skype for Business Online.
  • Configurations, Customizations and Extensibility options in Teams and Channels specific to the needs of your Organization as well as Configuration and Control around Third-party External Apps.
  • Solutions for Document Synchronization, Backup and Restore procedures and options.
  • Training, Documentation and Knowledge Transfer for your key Stakeholders as well as all end-users and employees

EPC Group's Teams Governance Strategy

Microsoft Teams Governance:

When people talk about governance these days we are typically talking about SharePoint. However, in today’s modern workplace a solid governance strategy should apply to the entire Office 365 stack.

For example, there’s no reason post-Teams implementation for you to be using network file shares. Instead, your organization should consider adopting SharePoint as your intranet.

You’re also going to need to assign how users should access files; if you don’t you could likely face file duplication because many times team members unknowingly share alternate versions of files in Teams channels instead of the original files in the file share.

Organizations are switching from the Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams at a rapid rate. Are you ready for Teams and Microsoft’s future road map?

Benefit from our 25+ years of experience around governance

EPC Group is a recognized industry leader in developing and implementing governance strategies for our clients across all technologies and services in Office 365.

Governance is a key component to ensure long-term success. It defines who will manage the environment or overall platform and define the related granular roles and responsibilities, required restrictions and enterprise compliance policies within an organization to establish rules for its appropriate usage.

EPC Group’s Teams governance strategies and related development follow four major pillars:
  • People: Roles and responsibilities
  • Process: How to accomplish common tasks as well as new business and technology requests
  • Technology: Leveraging features and tools to enforce policies
  • Policy: Collection of principles and clear definitions on how the platform is utilized
  • Streamlined processes for deployment of features and capabilities within Microsoft Teams
  • Helping protect your business from risks, security threats or noncompliance liability
  • Providing users with necessary guidance, recommendations and the intended and approved use of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams supports global standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, ISO27001 and HIPAA.

There is also added support for auditing and reporting & audit log search, eDiscovery and legal hold for channels, chats and files as well as mobile application management with Microsoft Intune. These tools reside in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Portal.

Microsoft Teams Implementation & Support

Overview of EPC Group’s approach

Microsoft Teams is the chat-based workspace in Office 365. It’s the hub for team and private chats, meetings, calls and instant messages and conversations. Microsoft Teams is extensible, customizable, secured and stringent on standards compliance to ensure your organization’s most sensitive collaborations are kept private.

Microsoft Teams in an amalgamation of various features and has a lot to offer. This modern chat-based workspace serves as a hub for teamwork and has completely revolutionized the way teams work and collaborate in this new era of digital transformation. EPC Group’s time-tested and proven consulting and management strategies will help you in making the most of these collaborative features to obtain desired results and enhance your organization’s productivity.

Microsoft Teams is built on existing Microsoft technologies woven together by Office 365 Groups. Out of the box, Microsoft Teams makes use of identities in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and integrates with the other services within Office 365 – it creates a SharePoint online site, an Exchange Online group mailbox and provides a shared OneNote notebook for each team created. From a single place, users can connect with a variety of key Office 365 apps and tools to help them work and collaborate more efficiently, such as:

• Calendars and meetings (Outlook)
• Create, share, edit and search content and information (SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote)
• Call and meet team members (Skype for Business)
• Instant messaging and chat (Skype for Business)

CONTACT INFO

Email: [email protected]

Mailing Address:
4900 Woodway Dr Suite #830
Houston, TX 77056
Phone: (888) 381-9725
Fax: (832) 575-3844

Whether you are looking to leverage the features your existing office 365 groups or implement Microsoft Teams and office 365 groups solution from the scratch, EPC Group, with its 20 years of experience in Office 365 consulting services, will provide a deployment strategy that is robust, scalable, secure, customizable and meets your organization’s exact requirements.

EPC Group will ensure –

• Strategic management, administration and maintenance of your Microsoft Teams implementation on a 24x7x365 basis
• Solutions and recommendations for Backup and Restore procedures.
• Governance strategy, Security, Regulatory and Compliance review and management
• Best Practices and Recommendations guidelines for optimal performance

Deployment and Migration Services

EPC Group’s offerings under the deployment and migration services support all technologies, capabilities, and features currently available for Microsoft Teams along with any upgrades and feature enhancements to ensure our clients are offered the best and latest in Microsoft Teams and Office 365.

EPC Group will provide your organization with:

• End to End Deployment and Migration Services including Implementation Requirements, Planning Considerations, Permissions, Microsoft Teams Provisioning, Testing, Installation, Setup and Administration.
• Understanding of the Integration with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, One Drive for Business, OneNote and Skype for Business Online.
• Configurations, Customizations and Extensibility options in Teams and Channels specific to the needs of your Organization as well as Configuration and Control around Third-party External Apps.
• Solutions for Document Synchronization, Backup and Restore procedures and options.
• Training, Documentation and Knowledge Transfer for your key Stakeholders as well as all end-users and employees.

Microsoft Teams Governance Strategy and Implementation

EPC Group is a recognized industry leader in developing and implementing governance strategies for our clients across all technologies and services in Office 365. Governance is a key component to ensure long-term success. It defines who will manage the environment or overall platform and define the related granular roles and responsibilities, required restrictions and enterprise compliance policies within an organization to establish rules for its appropriate usage.

EPC Group’s governance strategies and related development follow four major pillars:

• People: Roles and responsibilities
• Process: How to accomplish common tasks as well as new business and technology requests
• Technology: Leveraging features and tools to enforce policies
• Policy: Collection of principles and clear definitions on how the platform is utilized

Your organization can benefit from these detailed strategies that have been developed over the past 20 years through:

• Streamlined processes for deployment of features and capabilities within Microsoft Teams
• Helping protect your business from risks, security threats or noncompliance liability
• Providing users with necessary guidance, recommendations and the intended and approved use of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams supports global standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, ISO27001 and HIPAA. There is also added support for auditing and reporting & audit log search, eDiscovery and legal hold for channels, chats and files as well as mobile application management with Microsoft Intune. These tools reside in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Portal.

CONTACT INFO

Email: [email protected]

Mailing Address:
4900 Woodway Dr Suite #830
Houston, TX 77056
Phone: (888) 381-9725

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