Unify Your Business Apps With the Help of Teams
Microsoft Teams is a platform that offers levels of communication, collaboration, and productivity that was previously unreachable in business. The platform has experienced exponential growth throughout the pandemic as it allowed businesses to continue trading – no matter their size – regardless of where their team was working.
Microsoft Teams’ features can revolutionize your workday, with tools including Instant Messaging, the ‘Channel’ feature, files, calendar, and online meetings. Let’s break these down, and learn what they can do, so we can work out what makes them the best tools available today.
Teams’ features
Chat
The Chat feature allows your team to have a conversation one-on-one or with more than one person in a group chat (like every other messaging app out there). However, Teams is unique, because you can send text, add gifs, links and files. Using Team’s instant messaging can greatly reduce the amount of internal emails, and keep the conversations easier to follow – especially when you use Channels.
Channels
Channels are sections of Teams designed to keep conversations organized according to their specific topics, disciplines, or departments. Channels allows you to have full freedom over your environment – making it personable to the preferences of your Team. You can leave all Channels open to all team members, or you can make each one private for specific audiences.
Files shared in a Channel are automatically stored in a SharePoint folder. Each team in Microsoft Teams has a site in SharePoint Online and files shared are added to the document library. The permissions and file security settings you set in SharePoint automatically carry over to Teams and apply there too.
Files
When you upload a file to Teams it goes directly to the Files tab of whatever Channel you uploaded it to. Files that are shared in a private or group chat are stored in your OneDrive for Business folder and are only shared with the people in that conversation – allowing you to maintain security and ensure that only the desired team members will see those documents.
Calendar
The Channel feature works alongside the Outlook calendar data. This allows your users to stay on the Teams site entirely and not have to go backwards and forwards to different calendars to make them align. This means that your users’ experience in your cyber landscape will be as streamlined as possible, resulting in less time wasting and largely improved productivity.
Online Meetings
Meetings in Teams is – in our opinion – a great feature. It allows you to use audio, video, and screen sharing, making the ways you interact with your clients almost as personal as sitting opposite them in real life. Teams Meetings doesn’t even require a Teams account to join! You simply look in the invitation for quick and simple instructions to join the call.
All the features of Teams work in unison to make your workday easier to maneuver. Teams combines all of the Microsoft Suite into one easy-to-use application, allowing your team to enjoy their work experience from one platform as opposed to having to learn the functions of multiple systems.
There are, of course, alternatives but none are designed to interlink with others in their suite in such a complementary fashion. It’s easy to set up, but for best use of your time, mPowered IT provides full set-up, implantation and support to get you more productive right away. If you’d like to know more about Microsoft Teams get in contact with our team here.