Collaborating in Office 365: What is Microsoft Teams?

How many times do you get involved in a long email thread with a group of co-workers? Are your team communications difficult to document and scattered across multiple programs? How can your workgroup collaborate, chat, and share important files and resources more easily? His solution is Microsoft Teams. Teams is a cloud-based collaboration tool that is part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. Core capabilities of Microsoft Teams include:

• Creation and management of work groups.

• Communicate via chat/instant messaging

• Connection with audio calls

• Impromptu launch or scheduled video meetings

• Share files and links

• Documentation of work and resources.

• Simplify access to other Office apps

With Teams, workgroups within an organization can collaborate on content across different devices (laptops, tablets, and smartphones) and across multiple platforms, including Windows and Mac. Additionally, with Microsoft Teams, a team can also invite external partners, such as vendors, service providers, and consultants, to participate in collaboration and conversations, as well as to share resources. This is a great advantage for productivity and project management.

Better than Slack and Google Hangouts

At its core, Teams is a chat-based workspace featuring group and private/instant messaging, with threaded and persistent conversations. Although Teams competes with similar products like Slack and Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams is more robust, comes with Office 365, and connects with other Office 365 apps like Excel, Word, OneNote, Planner, and SharePoint. This integration with other Microsoft Office programs creates a smoother, more seamless portal and experience.

Note: If your organization currently uses Skype for Business for instant messaging, you’ll likely see a switch to Teams, as Skype for Business has an expiration (end of life) date in 2020.

Personalize with channels

Teams are made up of channels that can be organized by topics, projects, or departments. Channels are quite flexible as they store meeting history, chat, files or shares, and other communications that are easily searchable. Additionally, each channel can be customized with tabs for apps like SharePoint, Planner, OneNote, as well as file and other shares. Planner is an easy-to-use Office 365 app for creating to-dos or action items for members of a workgroup, and then tracking the progress of each action for a project or team.

Reaching out to a specific channel member or even the entire team is also easy with @mentions. Fortunately, the Activity tab in Teams makes it easy to catch up on all your unread messages, @mentions, replies, and more. Like other messaging services, Teams communications can also include emojis and GIFs, an essential part of any business communication. .

Video and voice meetings

Within a team-based messaging thread, you can easily schedule voice and video meetings or start a quick impromptu meeting with little effort. Teams meetings can even be scheduled from within Microsoft Outlook. Regardless of the method used to schedule meetings, they sync with Outlook to keep you up to date. Video meetings can be started with specific contacts or within a channel, and it’s easy to create a recording of the meeting. Microsoft Teams includes a cool artificial intelligence (AI) feature called background blur. With such a mobile and remote workforce, this tool allows you to remove a cluttered or unprofessional background from a call while still engaging with each participant on the call.

Microsoft Teams resources

To save time working with Microsoft Teams, pick up a Teams keyboard shortcuts booklet at http://thesoftwarepro.com/teams.