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A Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Teams | Microsoft 365

Organisations of all sizes are adopting digital collaboration and productivity solutions to accelerate team performance and drive innovation.

As organisations shift their focus from individual contributors to teams, they’re leveraging Microsoft Teams as a unifying endpoint for collaborative team communication, ideation, and document management.

Microsoft Teams is part of Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise editions, which also include stand-alone Microsoft Office 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Skype for Business, and more.

This blog post answers common questions about the role of Microsoft Teams in a modern organisation and how it integrates with other cloud-based services to support team collaboration. Let’s get started!

What Is Microsoft Office 365?

Office 365 is a cloud-based service that delivers a full set of business-class productivity tools to employees. It enables users to access these tools from any device, with or without internet connectivity.

Moreover, it provides IT, administrators, with ongoing management and security updates. Office 365 includes the core collaboration tools—Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Yammer—along with a full set of enterprise email and calendar apps.

You will also find Microsoft Office desktop apps, robust auditing, reporting, and compliance tools, and a growing set of intelligent apps (AI-powered apps like Microsoft Flow and Microsoft Graph).

What Is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a digital workspace that brings together all of the people, conversations, files, and tools your team needs to be successful. It’s built on top of Office 365 and offers a variety of features and capabilities to help teams work more effectively together.

Moreover, Teams is a new kind of team collaboration tool that provides a single experience for connecting with teams inside or outside your organisation.

It offers a modern experience for team collaboration with integrated chat, integrated videoconferencing, integrated document editing, and the ability to create custom channels to connect with the people you need to get work done.

It’s built right into the Microsoft Office suite and is available on PCs, Macs, Apple iPads, and Android tablets. Microsoft Teams is part of the broader Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise editions, which also include stand-alone Microsoft Office 365 applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Skype for Business, and more.

How Does Microsoft Teams Work?

Teams is designed around the concept of channels, which are dedicated spaces for specific topics, projects, or teams. Within each channel, you can have conversations, share files, and work on tasks together. You can also create private channels for sensitive or confidential information.

With Teams, you can easily share files with your team and work on them together in real-time. You can also access your team’s files from anywhere, on any device.

Why Teams?

Teams is a great tool for both virtual and co-located teams. It provides your team with a single place to discuss, collaborate and create content. You can create a team with users outside your organisation, or you can use teams to organize a virtual team that’s already co-located.

How Do I Get Started with Microsoft Teams?

There are a few different ways to get started with Teams. If your organisation already has Office 365, you can sign in to Teams with your work or school account. If you don’t have an Office 365 account, you can sign up for a free trial.

Once you have an account, you can download the Teams app from the Microsoft Store, Google Play, or the App Store. Once you have the app installed, you can sign in and start using Teams right away.

Microsoft Teams Features

You have a lot of robust features to look forward to in Microsoft Teams, including:

  • A unified communications and collaboration solution.
  • Microsoft Teams brings together your conversations, meetings, notes, files, and tools and integrates them with your organisation’s existing user directory for easy team and contact discovery.
  • Easy access to content via mobile apps and desktop integration.
  • A modern user experience across devices ensures that your team can stay connected and productive with easy access to communications and content.
  • Access to AI-powered apps from within Microsoft Teams.
  • Microsoft Teams provides a platform to connect intelligent apps with your team.
  • Intuitive and customisable user experience.
  •  

Teams provides a modern and consistent user experience across multiple devices, making it easy for your team to collaborate in real-time.

Teamwork in Microsoft Teams

As its name suggests, Teams is centred on the idea of bringing your teams together in expert fashion. As such, your teamwork stands to see great improvement. For example:

Unified Communications

Microsoft Teams helps you keep your conversations in one place. You can create one-on-one or group chats, and also make audio or video calls, or call people on the phone. The service also supports conferences with screen-sharing and polling.

What’s more, Teams’ Conversations let you have real-time conversations with your team using text, audio, or video. You can also set up group chats for larger conversations.

Real-Time Collaboration

You can create documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, and edit them together in real-time with others. You can also use a built-in quiz tool to ask questions and get feedback.

Colleagues and Experts on One Screen

With integrated bots that can surface information, automate tasks, and connect with third-party apps and services, your team can eliminate manual work and get more done.

Azure Meetings Integration

If your organisation uses Azure Meetings, you can use Teams to host meetings with video conferencing and screen-sharing functionality. You can also use Teams to create meeting rooms, invite participants to join meetings, and share meeting URLs.

Office Mix Integration

If your organisation uses Office Mix to create professional-quality team videos, you can use Teams to host the videos. You can also use Teams to create video playlists and share them with your team and others.

Conclusion

As you can see, Microsoft Teams has a lot to offer. It’s a powerful team collaboration tool that brings together communications, meetings, and tools into a single unified experience, making it easier than ever to get work done. Now that you know what Teams is and what it can do, you’re ready to get started!

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