Microsoft Teams is an impressive tool that provides solutions for your remote teams biggest needs including videoconferencing and chat capabilities, but even more than that it also can be customized within your organization to provide unique solutions based on your organization's needs.
What is Teams?
Microsoft Teams is an entirely cloud-based service that can help your organization cut down on operational expenses, speed up collaboration between departments, and offer supplemental file storage backed by the security of Microsoft Cloud Technology. It can help your team track their tasks and prioritize them accordingly to ensure timely delivery on their job duties.
Teams combines several of the Microsoft 365 applications into a single, easily managed platform with nearly endless options for customization . A highlight of the Teams platform is that the standard configuration contains all the basic project management, instant messaging, email and task tracking functions a business needs to maintain productivity but it can also scale with your organizations needs to an astounding degree.
Main Features of Teams
Chat – Gone are the days of businesses relying only on email to communicate internally. As more businesses rely on chat services teams provides a great chat feature that is intuitive and provides work spaces where users can store files shared with specific teammates. Team chat via channels lets businesses coordinate communication appropriately so the different parties involved with a project can communicate seamlessly and an always know how to find the right resource.
Calendar – You can create Team or Group calendars within team to keep different teams on-task and focused. Users can easily overlay a group or team calendar over your calendar or another calendar.
Integration with other Microsoft 365 – Most organizations rely heavily on popular Microsoft apps such as Word and Excel. The Teams platform allows for easy integrations with these apps for faster collaboration and sharing of project materials. For example: you can begin working on a collaborative file within the Teams environment and configure a persistent chat around the file to keep the conversation focused on that document. That chat conversation stays with the file throughout the project.
File Storage – A popular benefit of using Teams is that it provides an easily manageable cloud-based storage system for project related files. Team owners can easily add and remove members to a Team so that only approved team members have access to sensitive materials. Microsoft Teams works behind the scenes to leverage Share-Point online so other features like SharePoint lists are also available to Teams.
Videoconferencing – Another popular benefit of teams, especially during a time when many workforces are working remotely is the ability to videoconference easily and successfully within your organization and also with guests. Teams has great call quality and allows you to easily add guests and customize the experience for members of the call.
Deploying Teams
As with any new tool, in order to get the most from it, you need to make sure everyone using the tool understands how to do so successfully. A training session for end users that goes over what teams is and how to successfully use it's basic functions is essential. After beginning with a basic user education training, we recommend having resources and policies available for all of your teammates to ensure they can easily reference materials if questions come up while using Teams. We are happy to come alongside your organization and provide Teams training for your end users. To schedule Teams training for your organization visit:
Consult with Our Teams Expert
While basic user training is great for all users within an organization, it is best to learn how leaders within the organization can customize the platform. We suggest working with our Teams expert to assist in setting the tone and objectives related to how your organization will architect Teams and its channels and the different ways teams may be used in an organization.
Working with our Teams Expert you will learn how to tailor your team workspace to include key cloud services, explore data, create custom channels based on work streams or topics, and pin commonly used files and website for easy reference for your team.
When consulting with our Teams expert, you will learn how to develop policies for your organizations use of Team and how you can customize the settings within teams to work best for your overall organization as well as each group or department.