Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams

This is one of the newer features released and shows some real promise along with the Planner for helping small business get organised.

This app is all about increasing your teams communication. Create teams and open communication channels.

So whats so great about it ?

This app will allow you to create and organise your business based upon teams. Build a single company team or multiple teams, you decide.

You can chat with individuals or groups of colleagues and retain the chat.

Collect the chat and information including files in “Channels” so that you can separate your conversations based upon topics or teams.

Store documents and notes or create project plans that are accessible from a single location.

Create team plans and assign tasks.

Access your OneDrive whilst signed in to find information you need to share.

Getting Started

So the first step is how do you access the “Teams” application, this is fairly straightforward and can be done from a desktop or mobile app or the website. Just to make sure that your getting the most out of this there are mobile apps also.

Desktop and Mobile App.

Sign in to the website. https://teams.microsoft.com

Then setup your phone/tablet from the appropriate store by searching for Microsoft Teams. There are apps for iOS, Android and Windows phones.

TIP! You can download the app from the teams website , look in the top right corner.

Nice and simple.

As a small business we don’t have time to spend hours learning new things unless it will really make a difference.

Luckily the interface to Microsoft Teams is very simple and straight forward.

• The Activity will show things related to you, such as converations, replies and likes. You can also view your recent documents in here.
• The chat is self explanatory – send group and private messages.
• Build and work with the team. Create new teams and edit existing teams.
• Schedule meetings. These integrate with voice, video and chat.
• Access your OneDrive files.

 

So the first step is to create a team, you can create multiple teams for as we are focusing on a small business let assume for now we have a single team.

 Tip ! If you have already worked with Office 365 Groups and you are an Admin then you can also create a team based upon your existing groups. You will get prompted when you go to create a new team.

Build your team.

Add Members to your team. You can see from the image below that I can also perform a range of functions by clicking on the …

Create your channels

Think of channels in the same way as a radio or TV, tune in to conversations and information. The really cool thing about this is that you can go back and check it out again.

The channels can be linked to other apps via connectors to pull information in automatically and each channel can have its own files, notes and sources.

Share files and work together.

Upload files in to the files section of each channel for your team to work on. This keeps the relevant information with the right team members and allows you to organise the team data.

Your files will be stored in SharePoint within your Office 365 tenant.

TIP! You can edit these files in the online office apps or your locally installed versions just like a SharePoint Document Library.

You can control these documents just like other files and the app and website have most basic features.

You can get additional options wherever you see the three …

TIP! You can see the option to open in Word or Word Online as well as in SharePoint. Taking the SharePoint option will open the Document Library and show the files.

Add a plan to your channel.

You have built a team , and added channels now setup a plan for that team.

TIP! You cant link to an existing plan at this stage. That may be a future development. So if you are already using a planner think carefully about if you want to recreate it.

Connectors

Use connectors to pull in information from other sources. Link a channel to Twitter for example. This will bring the information straight in to the channel.