Microsoft Teams is an online communication and team collaboration tool that’s part of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. While it’s mostly used for video conferencing by remote teams, that’s not the only thing it can do. Teams can help you: Create dedicated channels for specific tasks or teams.
Microsoft have been adding lots of new features and applications to Office 365, such as Planner,Shifts and Microsoft Teams.
- Microsoft Teams allows for up to 250 people to participate in a single Teams meeting. But, this doesn’t mean you can see all users at the same time. Until recently, Teams only allowed users to view the 4 last active participants in a video call.
- The files in Microsoft Teams are involved with SharePoint since it is a robust document management system. Know, how Teams and SharePoint work efficiently.
- Teams, Assignments, How can students show their work? Hi, I'm not sure where to ask this question, so feel free to forward this as needed. I am a teacher trying to allow my students to show me their work while solving a math problem (Grade 5).
Taking on the likes of Slack, Microsoft describe Teams as a ‘chat-based workspace in Office 365’ allowing teams (internal only at this stage) to work together within one window to enhance teamwork. It's important to note that Microsoft Teams will be replacing Skype for Business (which will be retired 31st July 2021).
If you need any support adopting Microsoft Teams, please see our Microsoft Teams Services. You can also download this Quick Start PDF guide to give end users all the basics.
Microsoft Teams How Does It Work For Dummies
Need Teams governance guidance? Watch our on-demand recording of 'Managing Microsoft Teams' to see how to administer and govern Microsoft Teams.
What does Teams do?
Within one window, users can call upon a variety of key Office 365 apps and tools to help them work more effectively, such as:
- Calendars and meetings (Outlook)
- Create, share, edit and find content (SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote)
- Call and meet team members (Skype)
- Chat and instant messaging (Skype)
Key benefits of Teams
- One centralised hub
- Office 365 integration
- Customise Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
- Enterprise security & compliance
- Azure Active Directory integration
- No extra cost to Office 365 users
Using Teams
Before getting started it’s important to understand how Teams fits into the larger Office 365 picture, as creating Teams has some wider implications. Every Team created will automatically create a matching Plan (find out more on this in our Guide to Planner here), SharePoint Team Site, Office 365 Group and shared OneNote. While this brings a number of great benefits, such as shared documents and centralised team information, it can cause some governance and admin headaches. Luckily, the admin side of Teams allows this to be managed as we'll cover below.
Overview
Once your organisation has access to Teams, you can: download the desktop application, access Teams through your browser or download the mobile app.
Teams and Channels
To start your teamwork collaboration, you need a team. Setting up Teams is easy and done in a few clicks, requiring a Team name and a description; this then allows team members to be added. As mentioned above, a new Team will create a matching Office 365 Group, OneNote, SharePoint site and Plan—so this does need to be done with some caution.
Each Team has subsections, which are called Channels, and a General Channel will automatically be created. You can have multiple Channels within a Team; for example, you could have a 'Marketing' Team and then Channels such as 'Social Media', 'Product Launch', 'Blogs' etc. Or a Company could be a Team and Channels can relate to departments - you can choose whatever suits your organisation's way of working. Whenever there is a new notification or activity, the Channel will become bold.
Channel Tabs
Each Channel all have their own tabs along the top. Conversation (group chat), Files (shared documents) and Notes (shared OneNote) are automatically created and you can then add your own tabs.
Conversation
Conversations are one of the key features of Teams, allowing each Team to have a centralised discussion that is saved and easily searchable. Conversations are the central component where all teamwork is recorded—from file sharing to video calls.
The use of @mentions allows you to tag participants or even whole teams to notify others. Users that look at Conversations will easily see where they have been mentioned through the red @ symbol to highlight areas of importance to them. On top of this, your desktop app will notify you through an alert. As well as tagging, users can 'like' content and share emoticons or GIFs.
Files
In your Teams window, you can perform a variety of tasks directly within that window or browser, so that you avoid flicking between different applications. These tasks include the ability to delete, download, move files, open, copy, edit or get a link to share with others – giving you all the key features you would get in the native apps.
You can also start a Group chat alongside the file, to allow team discussions while all working on the files - and this conversation will appear in your Conversation thread.
View team files, edit, upload and create
Notes
Notes takes you to the Team shared OneNote. Within Teams you can view and edit your OneNotes (directly within the Teams window) or you can click to edit in the OneNote app.
Edit within Teams
Edit in OneNote
Adding Tabs
As mentioned, as well as these three automatic tabs you can also add your own, which currently include Planner, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Power BI dashboards and more.
Microsoft products can easily be added now, but there are also many future integrations coming to Teams, such as Asana integration. With integration between systems being so vital to teamwork, we can expect to see many more partnerships and out-of-the-box integrations!
Asana Integration
Menu
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.
Admin
Microsoft Teams is a great product already as it allows great flexibility and gives you many possibilities. However, as mentioned earlier, getting started with Teams can also bring some knock-on effects, which can cause admin headaches. Luckily, within the Office 365 Admin, you can control Teams settings within the Groups control panel. Within Admin settings, you can control who can create teams, what features are or are not allowed, such as video meetings, screen sharing or animated images or if extensions can be used. This gives the control required to allow governance in line with your organisation's policy and ensures you can keep control over the app. Find out more here.
End User Adoption Guides
To find out how you can use Microsoft Teams Live Events to easily stream live events such as webinars, product demos or corporate presentations to external and internal audiences, read our 'How to use Microsoft Teams Live Events' guide.
For organisations with employees working on shift patterns, Shifts in Microsoft Teams provides shift scheduling and management capabilities. Find out more with our 'How to use Shifts in Microsoft Teams' guide.
There are also some great end-user adoption guides available online from Microsoft.
To learn how to use the meetings and calls functionality of Teams, you can take a look at these Meeting and Calling How-Tos.
A Microsoft Teams End User Quick Start Guide is also available to download and share with users.
FAQs
Is Teams available now? Yes - Teams is generally available.
Which Office 365 Plans include Teams? Teams is available to Business Essentials, Business Premium, F1, E1, E3, E4 (retired) and E5 customers. It's also available for Education and Non-profit plans but not yet Government.
What is on the Teams roadmap? You can view the full Teams roadmap here.
What about Skype for Business? Teams will be replacing Skype for Business! Find out more here.
Does Teams work with those outside your organisation? Yes - this feature was added and can be turned on or off. Guest access is included with all Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Enterprise, and Office 365 Education subscriptions. No additional Office 365 license is necessary. Guest access is a tenant-level setting in Microsoft Teams and is turned off by default. Find out more here.
Conclusion
Microsoft Teams is already a robust offering and is benefiting from lots of new features and integrations. Even better, since Microsoft’s new direction under Satya Nadella, feedback and reviews on products have been well received with Microsoft actively acting upon public feedback. Microsoft Teams has a simple feedback program and you can go and view most popular suggestions, as well as see which ones are planned based on the number of up-votes. These requests and other features can then be seen on the public Office 365 Roadmap. This really shows a commitment to making a product aimed at user needs, so we have a great feeling about Microsoft Teams. What's more, seeing as Teams will be replacing Skype for Business we are sure that it will become well used!
Media coverage and reception has also been very positive with many Slack comparisons. Within these comparisons, Microsoft Teams is often faring very well in terms of features, usability and offering—but what makes it even more appealing is the fact that is it included with Office 365. For Office 365 users, this means that those who are already using other paid teamwork software can remove the licence expense, and those that aren't can gain access to a useful new application that competitors might be using - at no extra cost.
Next steps
If you are using Office 365, then we recommend trying Teams and providing your feedback to help shape the product. You can download a Quick Start PDF guide to get users started here.
If you are not using Office 365, then you can sign up for an Office 365 E3 trial (which includes Teams).
You can also find out how we can help with our Microsoft Teams Services or Contact Us and we can give an Office 365 demo or answer any questions.
This blog was updated on June 21st, 2020 to reflect on the several changes made to Microsoft Teams over the year.
Working with Microsoft 365 (Office 365) adoption we often get asked about Microsoft Teams – what are the pros and cons? Should we start using it – How do we explain it to our users. For many organizations that are already onboard the Microsoft 365 journey, the question is not if, it is when and how. Microsoft has made a strategic decision on Teams as the application for intelligent communication, discontinuing their investments in Skype for Business. But people don’t like being pushed into using something unless they see the benefits of doing so. What are the advantages of moving to Microsoft Teams?
In April 2018, we wrote an article called, “Is your organization ready for Microsoft Teams?” In the blog post, we listed some of the benefits and some of the disadvantages with Microsoft Teams. These points are still valid, but they focus more on the pros and cons of the application itself. In this blog post, I’d like to focus on the pros and cons of Microsoft Teams from a business perspective.
Pros of Microsoft Teams
1. Productivity gains and enriched communication
The breadth of collaboration tools offered in Microsoft 365 can often leave users disoriented. Teams increases productivity by making all your collaboration– conversations, chats, online meetings, shared files, tasks, etc. available in one single app and one single interface. In addition to the widely used apps from Microsoft, you have a wide range of 3rd party apps that integrate into Teams so that your users never have to leave the Teams app to get their work done.
Since Teams is developed by Microsoft from scratch without any legacy, it enables a more modern form of communication out of the box– with support for likes, gifs, emoticons, live link previews, etc. that enriches your communication.
2. Better focus on your work
With Teams, you can easier focus your attention on work-related topics and prioritize your time better. Instead of spending time going through an inbox that contains messages from everyone about everything, Teams compartmentalizes information into channels and puts your information in context. The channel only contains conversations, meetings and documents related to the topic of that specific channel. So instead of getting side-tracked with random email, or get stuck trying to clean up your inbox, you can focus your valuable attention and spend your limited time on the channels where you actually do your work.
3. Increased transparency
A big challenge for many organizations is keeping everyone in the loop and making everyone feel that they know what is going on. With Teams, this becomes so much easier. No longer do you have to worry about who to put on cc in an email or who to invite to a meeting. With Teams, you post your message in the relevant channel, @-mention the people you want to get notified and leave it for everyone else to read if they want, and by having meetings visible to everyone in the channel you increase transparency by enabling everyone in the channel to “pop-in”.
4. Seamless move to a digital workplace
There are so many business benefits of moving to a digital workplace in the cloud. Since Teams is a fully cloud-based solution, the move to the cloud is seamless. Being able to access information from anywhere on any device is a huge business benefit. In addition, with your workplace in the cloud, you can reap the benefits of big data processing and artificial intelligence to work smarter.
If you work in a multilingual organization, you can benefit from automatic translations of conversations.
If you missed a meeting you can easily tune in to the part of the meeting that is of interest to you by searching for particular words that were said in the video recording of the meeting – just to name a few.
5. New team members can more quickly get up to speed
In today’s agile workplace where we can easily source talent from anywhere in the world, getting people quickly up to speed is imperative. With Teams, you can quickly get new team members up to speed and engaged in the teamwork – no matter where in the world they are located.
Cons of Microsoft Teams
1. Difficult transition from Outlook
The best way to transition to Teams is for everyone who is a member of a team to fully embrace Teams and stop using Outlook all together (except for external communication). However, since there is still a deeply connected dependency on Outlook in Office 365 this becomes a challenge.
Microsoft Teams Does It Work On Windows 7
If you are editing a document in Word and send a sharing link to a team member, there is no option to send this via a Teams chat, the link is sent via email.
Currently, Teams does not support Group calendars, so to see your Team/Group calendar you have to switch to Outlook.
2. Structure of files confuse users
Millennials and Generation Z don’t care “where” files are physically stored, they just search for what they need. Many users still like to know “where” a file is located and go through a folder structure to find it. The way files are stored in Teams can be quite confusing. Everything that is uploaded to conversations is dumped in the channel root folder. If someone tries to organize the files and move them into properly named folders, the file links in the conversations break.
If you move a document to a new folder in Teams, the link to the documents with all conversations is broken.
3. Non-optimal online meeting experience hinders adoption
Microsoft has been working hard to include the Skype for Business meeting functionality into Teams and they have done a good job an also added new capabilities that weren’t there before. But the meeting experience still isn’t ideal, there are some things that are still not very intuitive and it doesn’t promote some of the great capabilities available in Teams for meetings (such as note-taking in OneNote). For users to embrace something as important as online meetings, they need to feel extremely comfortable with the tool.
Note: To learn more about recommendations for online meetings in Microsoft Teams see our blog post 5 tips to run effective online meetings with Microsoft Teams.
4. Challenges regarding permission settings
One of the key benefits with Teams is that it makes sharing so easy. Everyone who is a member of the Team automatically has access to all the channels and all the files in the Team, the same OneNote notebook, and so on. This is all great. But teamwork isn’t always that binary. Sometimes you want to differentiate and make permission settings more granular – which is not possible at the moment. You can create private channels in a team to create unique permissions for a specific channel (for instance “Management”), but you don’t have the ability to invite “guest users” to selected channels.
Say that you want to bring in a consultant to work on one of your customer projects. If you have a team for customer projects with a channel for each engagement, that consultant would see all other projects – unless you make all channels private (which isn’t recommended due to many of the limitations).
5. Limited flexibility can lead to manual replications
When you start working in Teams you don’t have the structure ready from start. You don’t know which channels you need, you might not know exactly what Teams you need to create. This evolves over time with the work that you do. Currently, the building blocks of Teams aren’t’ very flexible (you can’t move channels between teams). This sometimes leads to time wasted doing manual replications.
Say that you have a team for marketing activities. You start planning an event and create a channel for it. As the event grows, you realize that you need to create a separate Team for the event with additional team members. Currently, you would have to create a new team from scratch and manually copy or move relevant information.
The cons of Teams are still related to the application itself, and many of these issues are being addressed. Still, it’s important to be aware of them and to properly guide users, if you don’t – you won’t be able to reap the benefits.
Changing the way people do their work is not a question about switching from one technology to another, it’s about changing the behavior of people. For many this behavior, habits, or style of work, have been ingrained over decades. It’s naïve to think that is can be done overnight without any efforts. However, if you invest the time and you put in the efforts – the rewards are enormous!
If you need help in your digital workplace transformation journey Storyals can help. See our “Enhance Teamwork” Storyals topic here or book a demo with us so that we can show you how.
Don’t forget to check out our other Microsoft Teams blogs here.