Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent chat capabilities, video conferencing, file storage, and integration with many other Office 365 apps.
To put it simply, Teams brings together the best parts of Office 365 in a single tool. You can:
- Share ideas and expertise in private, chat-based conversations
- Create Office Online documents within the browser
- Integrate internal or external content & tools with different tabs
- Leverage bots to support your daily activities and task
Once your organisation has access to Teams, you can: download the desktop application, access Teams through your browser or download the mobile app.
Along the left-hand side you can navigate to different areas within Teams, such as Chats, Meetings, Files and Activity. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory:
Activities: Shows you the last activities of the Teams that you are part of.
Chat: This holds your Skype for Business conversations, providing a complete chat history. However, for a chat within a Team you should use the Teams menu and hold the group chat in ‘Conversation’.
Teams: An overview of all your Teams that you are part of and allows you to drill-down into each Channel within the Teams. This is also where you can create Teams.
Meetings: The Meetings tab pulls your meetings in from Outlook and also allows you schedule meetings within the Meetings tab that are sent to a Team. If you want to schedule other meetings with external users or individuals, you will still need to use Outlook, as the Teams Meeting tab is only to schedule a meeting with a Team. (Remember the aim is team collaboration, not calendar management).
Files: Within Files you can quickly find and view files across OneNote, OneDrive and within Teams (stored in their own SharePoint sites). There’s also a very helpful ‘Recent’ tab so you can quickly access the latest documents you were working on, as well as a shortcut to your Downloads.
