Entering 2020, companies throughout the world have seen the shifts and effects of multiple catastrophic disasters. Much like Super Storm Sandy in 2012, the 2003 SARS epidemic, and economic downturns the global community can clearly identify the impending catastrophe and similar to the Titanic, we scream “ICEBERG, ICEBERG” in futility. And now with the global pandemic that is the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, we are on a crisis that threatens the most valuable resource of the global economy – people.  

Is your company prepared for the inevitable? Have you devoted the time, money and effort toward your Business Continuity Plan? Are you able to handle these market shaking events and survive unscathed? During these times of crises, have you successfully implemented your respective satellite offices, remote teams, and Work-from-Home (WFH) policies?

“With remote work having a watershed moment due to the coronavirus outbreak (prompting a market boom for collaboration apps), it is part of the bigger argument that if your company cultivates regional diversity through distributed teams, it has better chances of surviving the world’s crises.”

During Sandy, in our previous Manila iteration, our decision to expand our technical resources in Manila paid major dividends towards our customer services. We were able to operate remotely without any service breakdowns 24/7 when downtown Manhattan has power outage for 2 weeks.

Are you prepared to collaborate remotely over an extended period of time? With increased global investments in collaborative tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams as well as the current global pandemic, it’s time for all industries to actively embrace remote work and collaboration.

At Xelure, our remote work practice hinges on effective communication and collaboration. A big part of our success in this is our implementation of Microsoft’s reliable stack of enterprise-grade collaboration tools. Want to empower your company with regional diversity by leveraging the same tech stack? Read on.

SharePoint

SharePoint is Microsoft’s platform built for collaboration, a virtual workspace with enterprise-based tools and services. Launched in 2001, SharePoint’s primary use case for businesses is a system to manage and store documents. However, the platform is highly configurable and has powerful built-in functionalities that organizations use in widely diverse ways.


Aside from its file-management system, teams have used SharePoint as a knowledge base, community portal, corporate news site, onboarding platform, training management, inventory tracking, discussion forum, project management, ticketing system, reporting and business intelligence tool, and more. For real-world implementation, you can check out these SharePoint case studies.

Highlighted Features:

  • Singular point of sign-on and access that centralizes information, content, and documents enabling easy management and tracking of projects, users and teams, as well as secure collaboration with external partners or organizations.
  • Powerful capacity to create intranets, social network, and various sites that connect, inform, and engage teams within the organization.
  • Power Apps and Power Automate (formerly Flow) build apps with business data and automate processes and workflows across applications and services.

Office 365 

Faced with growing competition from Google Cloud’s G Suite, Microsoft released Office 365 in 2011 as a platform designed to integrate its online services into a cloud service. As an upgrade of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office 365 is a subscription service that provides users with standard office productivity apps. Its cloud-based structure ensures that its suite of apps is automatically updated, with 99.9% uptime guarantee, and easily accessible anywhere.

Highlighted Features:

  • Real-time co-authoring that allows invited team members to work on the same file at the same time. You can see the changes made by others with edits automatically synchronized.
  • OneDrive storage and Office 365 mobile apps so teams can access their files anywhere and work on-the-go on any device.
  • Native integration with SharePoint and Teams streamlines the whole workflow cycle of content management and storage, collaboration, and communication.

Microsoft Teams

Slack’s launch in 2013 with its innovative take on the collaboration workspace led other companies in developing their own tools, not the least of which is Microsoft. The tech giant had considered acquiring Slack for $8 billion before finally deciding to build its own collaboration platform. After all, it has already built or acquired enterprise collaboration tools such as SharePoint, Yammer, and Skype. Microsoft Teams launched in 2017, eventually replacing Skype for Business as Microsoft’s chat and video conferencing tool. Just two years after, it had already overtaken Slack in the number of its daily users. 

As Microsoft’s take on the chat-based collaboration platform, Teams leverage its integration with the Office 365 productivity suite to give users a seamless experience within its ecosystem of apps and services. While it shares with Slack certain core functionalities like dedicated channels, Teams feature Tabs which act like quick links to the assets contained in a channel such as Files and Meeting Notes, as well as apps and services connected to that channel.

Highlighted features:

  • Full integration with Office 365 services which enables users to switch seamlessly between tasks within the app – from editing documents and creating forms to scheduling meetings and making voice-video calls.
  • Files, documents, other assets shared within Teams sync to OneDrive and SharePoint so every team member has access to the latest version and can collaborate in real-time.
  • Advanced meeting and calling features that incorporated Skype for Business functionality including full featured dialing capabilities with speed dial, voice mail, call history, cloud-based meeting recording, and federated meetings (which provide the ability to host meetings across multiple organizations).

SharePoint, Office 365, and Teams – these collaboration tools are just a few of the many technologies that power the remote work phenomenon today. With remote work having a watershed moment due to the coronavirus outbreak (prompting a market boom for collaboration apps), it is part of the bigger argument that if your company cultivates regional diversity through distributed teams, it has better chances of surviving the world’s crises.

Need help in building a Remote Team in the Philippines to support your business? Learn more about our Staff Leasing service. Explore our stack of Web Services to help grow your business online. For any inquiries, get in touch with our team.