Using Microsoft Teams
One of the applications that comes standard with Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft Teams. We often get questions regarding how to use Teams, and the best way to implement it for a business. We'll go into some basic tips here.
What Is Microsoft Teams?
Teams is cloud-based team collaboration software. Its main capabilities include business messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing. It's a chat and collaboration platform that's designed to simplify group work.
Think of it as a collaborative workspace. Teams facilitates your employees' productivity and effectiveness. It's especially helpful if you work with remote teams; however, many businesses use Teams for their in-house employees as well.
Teams Is More Than Just Communication
You can use Teams:
- For your Central Communications Hub.
- To reduce email clutter.
- For Video and Audio conferencing.
- To record AND transcribe your conference calls.
- To easily flag and save chats or conversations.
- To integrate with your entire Microsoft Office Suite.
You can also use teams for members outside of your organization. All of your communications are easy to save and find later, including your chats and conversations. And you can easily transcribe all of your conference calls straight to text.
You Can Keep Everyone On The Same Page With Teams
Teams can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. You can set up different teams, have different group chats, and keep everything well organized. And, you can do more than text with Teams. You can send:
- Files.
- Videos.
- Gifs.
- Emojis.
Businesses Use Teams For These Primary Benefits
1. Chat With Groups
Within your Office 365 Suite, all you do is go to "Create a new chat." From here, you can search for the people you want to send a message to.
If you wish, you can create a new group with these people (Group 1) And, when you want to create another chat with the same people, you simply refer back to your Group 1. Remember, you can add files, gifs, videos and more in your messages. It's a great way to instant message your team.
2. Conference Calls
You can use Teams to set up meetings. You can invite as many people inside and outside your organization as you want. Once they enter, you can conference call, video call, record and share screens, and more. Everyone can share screens and show what they're working on. This is a huge benefit.
And from within Teams, you can make regular calls or video calls to any one of your team members. Plus, you can download the Teams app on your phone. If a team member is out of the office, they can still receive your call, including video calls.
Add a group to conference calls. The possibilities are endless, and you can use Teams for conference calls as extensively as you want.
3. Set up different TEAMS (Sales, Marketing, Accounting, HR, Administrative, etc.)
You can set up teams (such as Alltek). You set up channels (like projects channels). Everyone on this channel will be able to see your communications. It's similar to group chat, but it brings everyone on your team in.
You can set up multiple chat rooms or channels within a Teams. Conversations are threaded and flow from top to bottom to keep chats easy to follow. Teams will notify your team member of any updates.
For face-to-face conversations, team members can, with a single click, jump right into voice or video chats with other channel participants. The number of participants in a video chat is set up so it can grow. Microsoft has integrated Teams with the Kaizala messaging service for large-group communication into Teams.
Channels in Teams also integrates with outside services via Microsoft Connectors. These Connectors already exist to push updates to Teams’ channels from GitHub, Evernote, Zendesk, MailChimp, SAP SuccessFactors and Salesforce. And Teams' framework allows more to be built, so you can link your own internal applications.
4. Share Files, Videos, Pictures, Updates and more.
I'm in marketing, so I integrated Facebook into my Teams channel. This will give me updates on Alltek' daily Facebook views, insights and more. Microsoft Teams integrates with a huge number of resources. And it's easy to do. You might want to integrate Excel files, PowerPoint slides, anything that will help to keep your team informed.
You can go into an Excel spreadsheet in Teams, make an edit and your team will see these in real-time. They can also make edits for everyone to see. You won't have to send files back and forth. This saves so much time.
Any file that you work on in Teams will always be at your fingertips. You won't have to search elsewhere on your computer. Collaborative editing of shared content with users' changes is reflected in the Office software in real-time.
Everything you work on in Teams will be stored, organized and easy to find. All documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. that you share within a Team will be synced with a copy that's stored in Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage and a local SharePoint environment. This way, every Team member always has access to the latest versions.
Are you looking for more IT tips for your business? Visit our Education Center to learn more.
What Are The Benefits Of Microsoft Office 2019 For Entrepreneurs?