Microsoft Teams Explained
Updated: Aug 10, 2021
If you are a fan of Microsoft products you’ve undoubtedly used Skype and most likely experienced some sort of issues. In fact, there are not too many Skype calls that I’ve been on where I did not encounter an issue. I fully believe the same holds true for Microsoft employees when it came to Skype issues, which is what I believe led to the development of this great collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based collaboration platform that’s core functionality includes Video and Text Chat. Microsoft Teams is part of the Office 365 suite of applications.
Microsoft Teams Features
Microsoft Teams unlike Microsoft Skype is rich with features and functionality that work! Some of the features included with Microsoft Teams are:
Activities Section - The Activities Section keeps track of what’s been going on with your Microsoft Teams. For example, you’ll be able to see when you were invited to certain teams and on what date.
Chat Section - This is where you’ll see past chats and be able to initiate new chats with your contacts to collaborate.
Teams Section - This section is where you’ll create your teams to allow collaboration between a set group of people. For example, I’ve created a Marketing Analytics Team, connected to the Google Analytics App, and added choice contacts to the team. If you were one of the ones added to the team will see an automated daily update of our Google Analytics Audience Overview Report and Acquisition Report.
Meetings Section - Here you can see your connected outlook calendar, cancel meetings, and schedule meetings.
Calls Section - This where you can make video or audio calls. You’ll be able to add numbers to speed dial, see your contacts, history, and voicemails. You can even create groups for easy collaboration between multiple people.
Files Section - In this section you’ll see your connected OneDrive storage account, past downloads, and files shared from your teams.
Apps Section - This section is probably the biggest differentiator for Microsoft Teams from Skype. Teams has many apps that can be connected that allows you to pull information from that service into a created team. Like I mentioned before, one of the apps I connected is Google Analytics and this allows me to disburse an automated daily update within my Analytics Team.
Microsoft Teams Resources
Are you interested in learning more about Microsoft Teams or maybe you already have Microsoft Teams and would like to know more about its features? Well, if for some unbelievably weird and crazy reason you don’t want to reach out to us here are some online resources that may help.
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