What is Microsoft Teams?

You have probably come across the name in your online experience, as the popularity has been rising ever since its release in 2017.  Our goal in this journey series is to explain how Teams is used, what are it’s features and how you can expertly use it with your work group.

Microsoft Teams is a part of the Microsoft 365 suite and is being adopted by many businesses around the globe, especially with the current pandemic and social distancing we are all facing. Employees are having to work from home, while adhering to safety precautions and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

As every organization is unique and has their own requirements, Teams lets you customize the platform to your exact business or cultural needs.

With our Microsoft Teams Journey series, we will be discussing features, applications and tips on how to use Teams with your colleagues or employees. You can look forward to the following topics in the near future:

• How to use Teams
• Usage and business application
• Microsoft 365 Integration
• Teams and Channels
• Tabs
• Apps and app categories 
• Bots

To begin, we will have a look at what exactly Microsoft Teams is and what it offers :

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool for teamwork and communication that gives you the ability to discuss and share information through chat, video, file sharing and storage and app integration.  Think of it as the heart of an organizations place of working together, to achieve a common goal. 

Using the Teams platform, you have the most sought out features that all businesses look for:

Let’s look a bit further into each specific feature:

Communicate – have the option of all communication possibilities, either text, VoIP or video chat from anywhere and at any time. Share ideas and as well as you character with the option to send GIFs, emojis, and stickers in a group chat or direct messages. If you need to be more direct, simply do a voice or video chat, with a single person or many team members at the same time.

Share – Teams is all about collaboration and sharing is an important feature to have. Not only can you share live documents and files while chatting, you can also share them during a meeting or even to people outside of your team. If that’s not enough, you can share your entire desktop screen by giving certain people access to what you are seeing.

Integrate – currently sitting at 406 (yes, that’s right) available apps to choose from, the long list should have some options that your business can benefit from. If, by some chance, there is not a single one that could work for your business, then you also have the option to create your own using the developer toolkit.

Be Secure – the online world is full of cybercriminals who want to get their hands on your data. Teams offers premium security and compliance traits to help you stay secure. From advanced encryption to saving files on a secure cloud, you can be assured that your and your clients information is safe from harm.