Get To Know Microsoft Teams

Host Jeremy Cherny discusses how to use Microsoft Teams as well as best practices.

 

What is Microsoft Teams?

 

If you haven't used it before, Microsoft Teams is a bit like texting or messenger on your phone in that it allows you to send messages to individuals, create group chats, and share files such as PDFs or photos. It’s much more than just that though. You can also create video chats for things such as one on ones, group chats, meetings, or video conferencing and because Teams can access apps such as SharePoint, Planner, and OneNote just to name a few, your team can work collaboratively on whatever they desire. On the whole, Microsoft Teams helps businesses because it helps keep everyone in the know and on the same page which increases communication, collaboration, and productivity.

 

Teams and Channels 

 

What is the difference between Teams and Channels? Teams are a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization. Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations and work organized by specific topics, projects, or disciplines. An easy way to look at it is the Team is the organization as a whole, and each Channel entails a specific department within that organization. Larger businesses may have to create a specific Team for each department and then create Channels for specific topics that are owned by that department. This really allows organizations to organize their work and conversations with ease. Whenever you create a Team, a Channel called General will automatically be created, and it’s up to you to create other channels to fit your organization best. 

 

Chatting and Conversations

 

Teams makes it far more efficient to communicate and collaborate due to the fact that traditionally, you would have to be doing all that communication through email. With Teams, those conversations show up as chats which speeds up the communication process tenfold. Within Teams, you have the ability to create chats which Teams calls chat-based collaboration. You have the ability to create one on one chats, group chats, chats within a specific Channel, chats in relation to documents that are being worked on, etc. How does this speed up the collaboration process? With Teams, your conversations and documents all stay in one centralized location so you have the ability to make changes, add comments, and chat with your team all in one place. Your chats within Teams are permanent so even when you exit out of, the chats are still there for you to access when you log back on. 

 

Files and Collaboration 

 

Within each team and channel, you have the ability to upload new documents, edit documents, or create new documents. You can even add cloud storage by connecting your Teams account with a 3rd party software such as SharePoint, Dropbox, ShareFile, or Google Drive. One of the best features of Microsoft Teams is that when you are uploading documents you have the option to use the “Co-Author” feature. The Co-Author feature allows multiple people to be in the same document at the same time, working simultaneously. This could be beneficial when you have a meeting agenda and multiple people are updating the agenda with their information, or if multiple people are creating a presentation and they can work together at the same time as opposed to emailing the presentation and working on it one at a time.