From the start, leaders at Clifton Coffee Roasters (CCR) knew they wanted to go beyond just roasting coffee. They wanted to empower other coffee companies to succeed. Now they provide technical support, delivery service, and back-of-house training to coffee shops across the UK, in addition to providing all of the products needed to run a coffee company.

But it wasn’t always that way. In the company’s early days, the team had a difficult time coming together, with employees scattered across the UK and no reliable means to connect them. Once they adopted a teamwork solution to improve internal communication, teamwork became easy and the business took off. The rest is history.

Want to take cues from CCR’s teamwork game? Contact us for help getting started.

Travel Counsellors Ltd. is an independent travel company headquartered in Manchester, England with more than 1,800 travel counselors operating in seven countries around the world. One of the company’s most important strategies for growth is to recruit more travel counselors globally–but to maximize this strategy, the company needed to move from on-premises Microsoft Dynamics to cloud-based Dynamics 365, an implementation spearheaded by Microsoft partner Alithya. But rather than sit on the sidelines while Alithya did all the work, Travel Counsellors tapped into Alithya’s unique methodology to empower a team internally to run the project, and relied on Alithya’s oversight, expertise, and experience to ensure that its internal team was doing things according to best practices to make the implementation as smooth as possible. Watch the video to see how this innovative approach to deploying Dynamics 365 helped Travel Counsellors achieve its strategic goals while learning CRM implementation from an inside, hands-on perspective.

Unlike any other competition, NASCAR is a sport where just one second of time can mean the difference between first place and a distant tenth. As such, racing teams like Hendrick Motorsports are always searching for ways to squeeze out another fraction of a second in performance. When NASCAR changed its rules to open up access to different data streams from each car–such as speed, brake level, and throttle position, coupled with GPS location–Hendrick needed a solution for generating actionable insights from this real-time telemetry information, and for sharing this information in real time with various stakeholders. To achieve this high-speed collaboration, Hendrick turned to Microsoft Teams for its efficient communication capabilities accessible in a single, convenient location, and for the solution’s enterprise-grade, end-to-end security. Watch the video to see how Hendrick Motorsports is using Microsoft Teams to translate real-time racing telemetry into lightning-fast decisions and faster race car performance.

For many organizations and their management teams, the mere mention of customer relationship management (CRM) inspires immediate fear and disillusionment. Far too numerous are the stories from companies across all industries about failed implementations, wasted money and time, and overly frustrated sales executives. But it doesn’t have to be that way, according to a Forbes article entitled “Seven Steps For Successful CRM Implementation.” In the article, author Marc Emmer asserts that past frustrations and failures with CRM implementation have little to do with technology, and more to do with the culture of the organization attempting to implement it. Read the full article to discover what Mr. Emmer feels are the seven keys to successfully deploying and utilizing CRM.

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All it takes to put together a winning team is finding the most talented people possible, assigning them to the same project, telling them the requirements and deadline, and then letting them run wild…right? Not so, says Sharon Florentine–in fact, far from it. In her article for CIO magazine entitled “6 ways you’re getting teamwork wrong,” Ms. Florentine draws a clear distinction between assumption and reality when it comes to teamwork, outlining what it really takes to assemble a truly superb group for getting the job done. Check out the full article before you put together your next mission-critical team.

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Did you know that up to 80% of workers’ time is spent on collaborative activities like responding to emails and attending meetings?

This guide to promoting a more collaborative workplace culture outlines common communication breakdowns in the modern workplace and provides strategies to help customers communicate and collaborate more effectively.

View: Unblocking Workplace Collaboration: 5 Tools and Strategies

When the same phrase is used so frequently and over an extended period of time, two things typically happen: first, it officially achieves buzzword status; and second, it begins to lose its meaning. Among the tech industry’s pool of du jour buzzwords, perhaps none is more prominent and overhyped–if not misunderstood–than “digital transformation.” In his insightful Forbes article entitled “Digital Transformation Is Not What You Think It Is,” author Jamie Notter argues that it is culture, and not digital, that today’s organizations should focus on when it comes to digitally transforming themselves. In other words, identify what cultural changes will help make your business successful, then adopt technology to support and advance those goals. Check out the full article to get Mr. Notter’s unique take on what “digital transformation” really means for your business–and more important, what it really entails.

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Digital teamwork tools are changing the way teams do business: Today, more than 30% of businesses use advanced communication tools in conference rooms.

With Teamwork solutions from Microsoft, you can facilitate better communication among your teams by using cloud-based email technology and calendaring services. You can also ensure that your teams are aligned with web conferencing and group chat. And that’s just the beginning.

Contact us to see how your company can benefit from our enterprise-grade communication technology.

View: Help customers bring teams and resources together with Microsoft technology

How do you differentiate yourself and stand out from your competitors? Delivering a more consistent, seamless, and personalized experience for customers is a great way to start–and an even better way to gain a competitive advantage by transforming the customer journey. View this infographic to discover how integrating Dynamics 365 applications with Adobe Marketing Cloud lets you leverage integrated tools and unified data to gain a 360-degree view of customers, orchestrate personalized campaigns, and deliver the right content, at the right time, at every touchpoint.

View: Transform the customer journey with Dynamics 365 for Sales + Adobe Marketing Cloud

For many organizations, digital transformation means integrating digital into every facet of the business, making digital the focus of every activity and process. But is that really the right approach? For a growing number of businesses, digital is increasingly being viewed as an enabler of broader business objectives rather than the end state or goal. In other words, many businesses are identifying what cultural changes need to take place to bring about success, and then adopting digital technologies to achieve that success. Like digital transformation itself, this shift in mindset is a journey–starting with recognizing the obstacles to digital transformation, the key attributes of a true digital culture, and how to overcome the former to become the latter. View the infographic to see what the journey’s all about.

View: Prioritize culture during digital transformation