Why Team Papers is the Perfect Solution for Teams Users

While Microsoft Teams has revolutionized daily collaboration, it often falls short for structured, high-stakes board meetings. This article explores how native Teams features struggle with complex document management and how Team Papers bridges the gap.

Ask any manager or executive about Microsoft Teams adoption and they'll echo the same thing: Teams is ubiquitous. The platform is the most popular unified communication tool in the world, with over 270 million daily active users.

This growth reflects its success in fundamentally transforming how work is done, largely by creating a single platform for the entire Microsoft 365 suite. This deep integration eliminates the need to jump between separate applications, centralizing daily workflow:

  • Outlook & Teams: Users' calendars are unified for quick scheduling.
  • Planner: Lets teams visualize projects, assign tasks, and track progress.
  • OneNote: Enables collaborative note-taking, turning a channel into a shared knowledge repository.

Having all of these and many more located in one central location is the core benefit of Teams for businesses, dramatically simplifying their digital experience.

Revolutionizing Hybrid and Remote Work

Teams has also revolutionized hybrid and remote work with its strong instant messaging and video conferencing. By consolidating chat, video, and file sharing, Teams enables seamless cross-timezone collaboration. For example, a developer in Singapore can share feature implementation with designers in London, providing a full transcription of all notes and messages for a project manager in San Francisco when they start their day.

This benefit is demonstrated in a report done by Forrester:

Over 90% of global IT and business decision-makers agreed that "Teams has created better remote worker engagement."

Teams' utility is further enhanced by its expansive library of 3rd party applications. Teams' open architecture allows teams to integrate their critical external tools—like CRM, HR systems, or development trackers—directly into the workspace, reducing context switching and enhancing platform security through unified authentication.

The Challenge: Where Native Teams Falls Short

Document collaboration is a key element of Teams' offering. Every time a new Team is created, an accompanying SharePoint site is added, with every channel having its own folder. This means that for all of the documents stored in Teams, you automatically get all of the document management features built into SharePoint such as version history, co-authoring, and recovery.

For spontaneous teamwork, sharing documents back and forth, or collaborating on a presentation, Teams thrives.

However, for structured meetings that require deliberate reviewing, annotating, and resolutions, Teams' file repository comes up short.

When a board or committee needs to review dozens or more documents in a specific order, mark them up with annotations and notes, or take resolutions, something needs to fill the gap.

  • Board members would need to navigate through a web of file organization in no chronological order to find the correct documents.
  • Individuals may download PDFs and annotate them locally, making annotation syncing impossible.
  • Users must resort to a shared Word document or Planner tasks, making them entirely impractical.

The Solution: Team Papers by Pervasent

Team Papers by Pervasent makes Teams better by improving the way document-based meetings are organized and distributed.

From a tab in Teams, meetings can easily be created, agendas added, and documents distributed. Traditional board meetings required executive assistants to compile dozens or hundreds of documents into a board pack that they would have to print for each board member. If a last-minute item came in or a revision to a document was made, a stressed administrator would have to go through board packs and find the document, again, for each board member.

Team Papers transforms how document-based meetings work within Teams.

A Seamless User Experience

Board, executive, or any meeting team members can access all their documents directly from an app on their iPads, Windows, and Android devices. Meetings are made simple, with an easy-to-use application that makes collaboration on documents easier.

Go Paperless: Instead of carrying around printed board books, attendees can access Team Papers from a tablet or mobile device.

Sync Across Devices: Users' annotations—notes, highlights, and pen marks—sync across all devices in the Cloud, meaning an important comment a user added on their desktop earlier shows up on their tablet during the meeting.

Structured Agendas: Instead of searching through a Teams' file repository, meetings are structured in an agenda format, making it easy to find just the document you are looking for.

Simplified Security and IT Management

Most board portal solutions run their services from proprietary platforms, requiring administrators to set up user accounts, manage permissions, logins, and security outside of Teams.

Team Papers allows you to use your existing Microsoft user accounts, making setup all that much easier. Worrying about the security of a third-party application is no longer necessary, with all of your documents secured under the Microsoft umbrella.

What Our Customers Are Saying

Our customers are already seeing the benefits of Team Papers. Anthony McClure, a senior technical consultant for one of the U.S.'s biggest healthcare organizations, says Team Papers has revolutionized their process:

"Managing last-minute changes to confidential documents for high-stakes meetings like board sessions and MEC (Management Executive Committee) meetings is always a challenge. But ever since we integrated Pervasent's Team Papers app into our workflow, everything has changed for the better. The app allows us to make real-time updates, collaborate seamlessly, and securely manage documents — all in one place."

This touches on Team Papers' superpower: allowing you to keep all of your sensitive documents in Teams, but providing a tool that allows for you to get the most from them.

Nick Stillings, a Microsoft Customer Success Manager, put it succinctly:

"Pervasent's Team Papers solves [Board members' unique challenge] by bringing a virtual board book into a Teams Meeting. It integrates as an app, allowing content to be prepared online, then brought into the meeting with minimal fuss."

The Future: AI Integration and Copilot

There are also many features and tools coming to Teams that expand on its functionality. Microsoft has publicly committed to making Teams the central hub of workforce AI integration. Currently, Copilot has a lot of room to grow, but on-screen content analysis, enhanced meeting summaries, and multi-lingual meetings are coming down the pipeline.

Team Papers is designed to fit seamlessly into these innovations.

Coming soon, Pervasent will release AI agent integration with Team Papers, allowing meeting attendees to prompt Copilot for:

  • Document summaries.
  • The results of decisions made in past meetings.
  • Translations.
  • Optimal meeting times based on attendees' calendars and much more.

Since Team Papers is embedded in Teams, it becomes another tool in the arsenal, allowing users to refer to information gathered in meetings, anywhere, anytime.

Conclusion

We could not be happier to provide a solution built on Teams—we love Teams. We are excited for what Microsoft has in store as they continue to make Teams a central hub for all businesses.

When it comes to complex, document-based meetings like board sessions or executive reviews, Team Papers is the only solution that fills this gap. It reduces administrative overhead, eliminates wasteful paper board books as well as unsecure, messy email chains. Pervasent also is prepared to grow with Microsoft, working to integrate Copilot's expanding capabilities into Team Papers.

Team Papers is not just a helpful add-on, it's essential if you are conducting document-based meetings in Teams.

Get Started Now

To learn more, schedule a demo or start your free trial, please fill in the form and we’ll get back to you shortly.

 

For pricing, please indicate the total number of users in your message. If you currently use another board portal, Pervasent can provide substantial savings over your current solution.

    Set up a demoGet a quote