Microsoft Teams is a great online platform within Office 365 for efficient and effective (i.e. productive) collaboration. I don’t really understand why Teams was only used sparsely by our customers until recently. Maybe it was because Teams is not that well known yet and unknown makes unloved. Yet Microsoft Teams has been on the rise lately and for good reason. Teams has everything it takes to give the quality of collaboration a serious boost. You can also install it on mobile devices, so you can keep in touch with each other on the go. I would like to briefly explain the most important functions with Microsoft Development Services.
General
For starters, it’s good to know that Teams is fully integrated into Office 365. This means that you can work with familiar applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can quickly share the files you create with your team, without having to email back and forth endlessly. You can also easily find those files thanks to the handy internal search function. But when you open the application, you first see the home screen with a submenu on the left.
Activity
Here you get an overview of the activities that have happened within your Teams environment. For example, you can see if you’ve been added to a team, missed a call, or files have been added to a team folder. You can think of this as a kind of news service that keeps you up-to-date on the events that are important to the partnerships of which you are a part with Microsoft Development Services.
chat
Within Microsoft Teams you can easily chat with colleagues, but you can also create a chat group yourself. In it you can not only consult online or even make (video) calls with each other. You can also share files with each other during the chat, just as you are used to – for example – in WhatsApp. This way you inform each other very efficiently about information that is important for the team.
teams
In the Teams submenu you can see which groups you are a member of and what information you have access to. When you click on a team name, you can see which conversations have taken place in the team. This way you are quickly informed of current affairs and conversations that have taken place before. If you navigate to Files, you will see all file folders and individual files shared in the team. You can then immediately open and edit it with Microsoft Development Services.
agenda
Because Teams is fully integrated into Office 365, you also have a link with Outlook. From there, all your meetings and appointments are exported to Teams and you have direct insight into your agenda for today. You can also scroll further through the week to see what else is in store for you, and you can even schedule a meeting right away. Due to the perfect interaction between the Office 365 applications, this is (of course) immediately displayed in Outlook.
To call to action
In the Calls submenu, you’ll see a quick-dial list of people you often interact with. Here you can easily add your speed dial, so that you can smartly add and call contacts. Here is also the list of all contacts and you can view your call history. And did you receive a voicemail? Then you can easily listen back under the Voicemail submenu.
Files
Microsoft Teams is excellent to use when you collaborate with your colleagues on different files. This way you can easily store your files in Teams, so that your team members always and everywhere have access to these files. In addition, you can use Teams well when you want to share a document from OneDrive with your Team. You can also smartly publish your files via SharePoint. SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive are effectively connected to each other . At Versa Welzijn, one of our customers, we have given the IT environment a brand new look. We have also implemented the SharePoint and Teams applications. Do you want to know how we tackled this? In this customer case we tell you how the IT transition went at Versa Wellbeing.
And more…
When you click on the three dots under Activity, Chat, Teams, Calendar, Calls, and Files, you’ll see even more options, such as “OneNote” and “Planner.” Via ‘OneNote’ you can directly access your notes that you have saved here, under ‘Planner’ you can see the tasks and activities of your colleagues in your Team. As a result, you are even better informed of the developments within your team. Besides all Office 365 apps, you can also add your own applications here that help you and your team take collaboration to the next level with Microsoft Development Services.
Productive
Microsoft Teams is a fantastic tool to vastly improve team communication. This is not only interesting for project teams that work together for a longer period of time, but also for ad hoc connections that have to achieve results in a short time. When you can quickly share knowledge within a team, you make it easier for everyone to be productive. And setting up a team or creating a new channel is a snap.
Are you curious about which functionalities Microsoft Teams offers? In our redpaper you can read how you can take collaboration within your organization to a higher level with the help of Microsoft Teams. Download the red paper.
