CONTACT Activities: the new Microsoft Teams integration
Activity Stream is the central tool of our Elements platform for internal communication and allows the quick and targeted sharing of information, files, and images. Now, it’s even easier to stay up to date with your projects or company-wide news thanks to the new Microsoft Teams integration.
Discussing a technical change, sharing documents, or communicating a new policy: email distribution lists are not well suited for keeping internal project teams and the entire company up to date. In contrast, the Activity Stream works like a social media network. It chronologically captures the communication history in group chats, links relevant people and content in the system, and makes the entire information exchange traceable.
The Activity Stream as a part of all CONTACT Elements applications enables users of our software to initiate context-specific discussions in their topic channels or inform the entire company about important news. Here, we briefly present what has changed in the Activity Stream with the latest advancements of our Elements platform.
Complete redesign
The Activity Stream comes with a new look in the latest CONTACT Elements release. In addition to a space-saving redesign, it now features a like button, a right-click menu, and an interface for displaying Activity posts directly in Microsoft Teams.
The new Teams integration is an optional addition to CONTACT Activities and aims to notify users of current events quickly and conveniently via push notifications.
Microsoft Teams integration
Many customers use Microsoft Teams for meetings, chats, and presentations. With the new Activity Stream integration, their employees can now read and track posts relevant to them in a dedicated Teams channel. For example, a product developer or a production planner receives all updates on an ongoing project and can jump from the Teams chat directly to CONTACT Elements, where the expert can continue working in the appropriate context.
Administrators can set up a transfer to Microsoft Teams for any CONTACT Activities channel. The push notifications are sent chronologically and not grouped as a thread. Each entry into the Activity Stream (post, comment, and system post) is presented in Teams as an individual "card".
Instructions for installing and configuring the new Microsoft Teams interface are available in the documentation.
CONTACT Elements core services and technology components
CONTACT's low-code platform Elements provides further core services for its specialist applications that offer numerous advantages for the industry. In addition to the Activity Stream, these include document management and CAD-independent 3D visualization, tasks, workflows, universal classification, and the uniform web UI. Modern web technologies, open-source software, and industry standards also ensure interoperability through the seamless integration of other IT systems (even older ones) and the networking of industrial assets, reliable authentication, role and rights management, as well as secure operation on-premises or in the cloud. These cross-sectional functions benefit nearly all departments in the company.
