What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a messaging application for an organization. It is designed to support connections, communication, and collaboration irrespective of the user’s location. It’s an all-in-one platform where the team can chat, meet, edit documents, and build business processes. It makes collaboration easy by pulling together the whole team, whether local or remote, letting them share pertinent information, assign tasks, schedule meetings, and collaborate on documents.
How to work better together with Microsoft Teams?
1. Communicate with anyone & stay in sync
Connect one-on-one or in group chats – As work styles become more and more diverse, communication challenges arise. With Microsoft Teams, people can choose how to communicate – in private one-on-one chats, group chats or broader conversations that are visible across the team.
Converse with context – Businesses are dynamic. Members, roles, priorities, and goals change, which can make tracking communication threads difficult. Microsoft Teams maintains a history of communication that’s independent of people coming and going. Chats are threaded, Which means replies to a post stay grouped with the original post. This makes it easy to track or catch up on multiple conversations in a single channel.
Share information with transparency – Increased visibility of communication can transform the culture of a team and help employees work better together. In Microsoft Teams, discussions in channels keep things organized and in context, as well as making it easier to access and share information.
Work with virtually anyone – Guest access through Microsoft Teams enables easy collaboration with contacts outside your organization by granting them access to existing teams and channels. People with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook or Gmail, can participate as a guest in Teams with access to team chats, meetings, and relevant files.
Communicate from nearly anywhere, in any style – Microsoft Teams provides a wide range of communication opportunities for spontaneous, scheduled, or formal meetings. From a quick chat with a colleague to a team wide presentation, meetings can be launched with one click to enhance team collaboration.
Record, transcribe and translate – In Microsoft Teams, people can record their meetings and group calls to capture audio, video, and screen-sharing activity. There’s also an option to create automatic transcriptions, so team members can play back meeting recordings with closed captions and locate specific discussion items. The recording is saved to Microsoft Stream for easy and secure sharing across an organization. Translation capabilities within Teams streamline collaboration across geographies by letting people automatically translate messages in the language specified by their personal settings for Office 365.
Connect your way – Microsoft Teams is available across mobile, desktop, browsers, and a wide range of devices – from headsets to Surface Hub to meeting room devices. From home, at work or on the go, people will have a seamless experience across web and mobile apps. When you switch from web to mobile, or from one on-one to group chat, Teams enables an easy, consistent, natural workflow. When you’re using Microsoft 365, device management is simplified. Sensitive data is kept safe while your team is communicating.
Work remotely together – Screen sharing is essential for collaboration. Whether you’re presenting, having a meeting or chatting, Microsoft Teams gives you the flexibility to share your workspace at nearly any moment. Plus, you can choose which window to share, so only relevant information is displayed.
2. Collaborate intelligently with your favorite Office apps
Microsoft Teams brings files, apps, meetings and calls together – Microsoft Teams uses SharePoint for storage, so your Office 365 files are accessible and editable directly within the Teams workspace. Because meetings and calls are in the same place, your information is contained within one environment. Spend less time searching for files and information and more time collaborating.
Enjoy built-in access to Office 365 apps – When it comes to collaboration, Office 365 integration enables today’s multigenerational workforce to use the Office apps they know and love. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner and Power Bl can be accessed directly within Microsoft Teams. So, you can create and edit files in Teams, as well as the native app itself.
Version control made easier – Microsoft Teams brings your Office 365 applications together, so you can easily share, edit, and co-author files. Unlike sharing files over email, where version control can be challenging, Teams stores documents in SharePoint and automatically tracks version history.
Co-create on the fly – Seamless virtual meetings and screen sharing with Microsoft Teams empowers people to connect at the most crucial moments, removing barriers to collaboration, especially when your teams are in a creative flow.
Easily schedule and join Microsoft Teams meetings from Outlook – Managing email correspondence in Outlook doesn’t mean you’ll miss your next Microsoft Teams meeting. In fact, you can join and schedule Teams meetings from Outlook
View and edit your synced Outlook calendar – You don’t have to jump back and forth between apps to manage your schedule because your Outlook calendar is viewable and editable within Teams. When you’re using Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365, collaboration is simplified. The team can stay focused and on time.
3. Work with Confidence
Built-in security – Microsoft has decades of experience building enterprise software and invests more than a billion dollars each year in security. Microsoft Teams comes with the same security and compliance standards and controls that customers expect from Office 365.
Teams is part of Office 365, meaning you benefit from these additional features and services:
- Data encryption, at-rest, and in-transit.
- Customer data remains in region or in country.
- Data loss prevention.
- Archiving, legal hold and eDiscovery.
- Customer content isn’t accessible in logs or telemetry.
- Multi-factor authentication for enhanced identity protection.
- Secure guest access with Azure Active Directory managed guest accounts.
- Built-in Mobile Device Management in Office 365.
In-country data residency available for Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, and Australia.
Built-in compliance – On the compliance side, Microsoft Teams is at the highest level of certification that Microsoft has for Office 365 – it’s at parity with SharePoint and Exchange.
By default, Teams has compliance leadership with:
- FERPA
- ISO 27001
- ISO 27018
- EU Model Clauses (EUMC)
- GDPR
- HIPAA Business Associate Agreement
- SSAE 18 SOC 1 Report
- SSAE 18 SOC 2 Report
- FedRAMP
- IRS 1075
- FFIEC
- HITRUST CSF Assurance Program Assessment
- CSA STAR Self-Assessment
- Australia IRAP
- FISC (Japan)
Easy to manage – Microsoft Teams has unified and familiar administration experience with the controls and granularity that IT departments need. Administrators can manage the end-to-end user experience in Teams and other Office 365 apps from the same place.
Teams comes with enterprise-grade management capabilities, meaning you can configure and set policies down to the user level. And you can control workloads, from meetings and messaging to live events and guests, plus manage the trusted apps your users can access.
4. Customize the workspace with apps and services
Pin important files, apps and dashboards – Being able to personalize your workspace to your particular needs helps you get the most value from Microsoft Teams. That’s why you can easily customize Teams channels to suit your workflow by pinning the most important information where you need it.
Use built-in and custom tabs – Tabs in Microsoft Teams allow team members to access services through a dedicated space within a channel or chat. This lets them work directly with tools and data and have in-context conversations.
Add tabs to a channel, private chat, and group chat to help integrate cloud services and help users easily access and manage the data they need or interact with most.
Build integrations to existing business apps using Microsoft Teams developer platform – Microsoft Teams has an open developer platform with third-party services and a rich set of capabilities to build custom apps or integrate with new or existing business processes and services.
- Bots help you get tasks done in conversations in Teams. For example, bots can kick off workflows and provide status updates, give, and receive kudos from team members, create lightweight surveys to gauge employee satisfaction and answer natural language questions about sales and customer usage data.
- Connectors help you keep current with content and updates of interest from other services you frequently use like GitHub, Trello, Bing News or Twitter.
- Actionable messages allow you to add rich content to connector cards.
- Compose extensions allow you to query and share rich cards in conversations.
- Activity feed is your single inbox where you’re notified of important content from channels, chats, and apps.
- Extend customizations even further with the intelligent fabric of Microsoft 365 and SharePoint.
Manage trusted apps – Microsoft Teams gives you control over user settings in the Teams admin center. Within the admin center, you can enable and disable default apps and configure settings to control external apps.
Empower Firstline Workers – Microsoft Teams enables Firstline Workers – such as sales associates, field service workers, customer service representatives and medical staff- to communicate and collaborate effectively with a customizable mobile experience. IT administrators can give employees role-based access to the primary Teams features they need. With Shifts, the schedule management tool in Teams, managers can easily plan and create shift schedules, and team members can review schedules and makeshift requests from their mobile devices – in real time.
Conclusion:
Microsoft Teams can empower an organization to expand on collaboration and communication benefits in one intelligent solution and modernize the teamwork.
