Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage (including collaboration on files), and application integration. Teams is a great way to stay connected with your colleagues or peers remotely and has recently been relied on massively by many organisations!
Below are some of the keys functionalities within Microsoft Teams which make it a great software to use whilst working remotely;
1 Access Teams across all of your devices
With Teams you can collaborate on the go easily! It is available to download on Android, Windows, and iOS! Teams provides a simple and easy-to-use app that allows you to chat with your team via text, have a voice conversation, or a video meeting.
2. Staying connected whilst working remotely
Teams is a great web interface to communicate with your colleagues whilst working remotely, all meetings include an online “join” option so that team members can join from wherever they are working. You can also turn video on so your team can interact face to face and feel more connected. Also, during meetings there is an option to select “record”, this means that team members can refer back to the meeting later or for those who aren’t able to join can watch later.
3. Immediate searching for information
On Microsoft Teams, the search function makes it easy to find relevant information from past conversations or files. You can directly schedule meetings for your group where all members within the team are automatically invited. These content search capabilities provide a way to search your Microsoft Teams information, including:
- Exchange
- SharePoint Online
- OneDrive for Business
4. Collaborate live in real time
You can complete work in real time with your colleagues as you chat together, and work on files through Teams, rather than taking turns emailing updates.
5. Conversation threads
Teams displays chats as threaded conversations, so you can easily track the flow of conversation without getting lost. Within a Team, you can make multiple chat rooms and channels. Users are notified of any updates and if they need to communicate with someone face-to-face, they can switch the conversation to a voice or video chat with just one click.
6. Integrate third-party applications quickly
Some examples of applications which can be integrated into Teams include MailChimp, YouTube, Smartsheet, and Zoom.ai, but there are hundreds of third-party apps that have been integrated into the Teams platform.
7. Cyber security
Microsoft Teams is built with the best cyber security, however no software can prevent all phishing attempts, or all malware and ransomware attacks, but Teams does features two-factor authentication and encrypted data.
8. Quickly get work done with slash commands
There are many slash commands that you can use on Teams! The most popular being “/away”, this sets your status to Away. When used in a chat app, slash commands let you join a channel, invite other users into a channel, mark yourself as away/busy/available.
9. The @ feature
The best way to make sure someone on your team sees your message is to @mention them! All you have to do is type @ before someone’s name and they’ll get a notification. If you need to get the attention of your entire team, or relay information to them all, just type @team before your message.
10. Integrated between Outlook and Teams
The relationship between Teams and Outlook is seamless with the function of being able to move a Teams conversation to Outlook just by clicking the “…” icon, which means ‘more options.’ Similarly, you can also move a conversation in Outlook to Teams―including attachments. To do this, you simply just click “Share to Teams.” If you’d like more information on how to use this feature. Currently, these features are only available on desktops, as opposed to mobile applications.
