What is Microsoft teams? Let’s go over a quick overview of what Microsoft teams is and where it really shines as a communication tool. At its core, Teams is a chat tool, that resides on basically any platform you can think of, Windows, Android, Browsers, iOS, and Mac OS. And it syncs across the board, it does not matter what platform you prefer. It is designed with productivity in mind, and collaboration is the primary driver of the software. Teams makes it easy to share documents, communicate with groups of people (i.e. your team,) or designed around projects. It is great for on the go communication with your team.
As Microsoft continues to add functionality to teams over the coming years, it will become more prevalent no matter the size of the business but let’s look at use cases for small businesses. Some businesses are spread across the entire country, even though they may be a small business, such as developers, recruiters, architects, and many more. With teams it doesn’t matter where you are located the tool provides constant contact and communication with the people you work with daily. The small business is always very cost conscious on all fronts and being able to have a product that is included with Office 365 that is enterprise grade makes it an even easier choice to make to use in your work place.
Three primary functions of the team’s software are Chat, Teams, and Meetings. Each one has a great use case.
Chat – chat is primary used for one on one communication, you can transfer files, voice and video chat, or and others to the chat group.
Teams – The teams section is designed for groups of people, this could be project based, or a general chat for the entire company. But this is where the collaboration piece really comes in to play. A wiki can be created, files added in, meetings created, separate conversations are also in here called @mentions.
Meetings – The meetings section integrates with your calendar, it’s a different way to share meeting request, than through email. But at a quick glance/view its faster to pull up than outlook.
Recently Microsoft has been moving all of Office 365 users off of Skype for business (a poor product in my opinion) over to Microsoft Teams. Now even though there is not fully functionality of what Skype for business had, primarily on the voice side, it is getting closer quickly. But it already is night and day more useful over Skype for Business. Also, screen sharing was recently added, someone can easily share a screen within the team now and give a presentation, give control, or even just to show your team members what is going on. This is a HUGE addition to teams, this makes it use case even stronger.
One area which is still having issues is cross domain communication, meaning our voltonesp.com Office 365 account should in theory be able to communication with people on teams in another example.com domain seamlessly. But this isn’t the case, trying to find someone within teams in another domain is difficult, it creates a quirky guest communication label, and is confusing to use. Microsoft has a way to go in this area. But what we see when it happens is instant communication to us for support. We will be able to see what is going on a user’s screen within seconds vs having to make a phone call.
I thoroughly enjoy using teams as my primary communication tool, even though the product is still far from being mature, Microsoft has defiantly gone all in on developing a product that is hear to stay for a while.
Take a look at the 2019 Teams Blog and Roadmap website - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/bg-p/MicrosoftTeamsBlog
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