The pandemic has meant that people have to find new ways to stay connected to work, family and friends.
There are a lot of different software options out there, but not all of them consolidate communications in one place as well as Microsoft Teams.
Teams puts several different tools into one platform, including:
- Video meetings
- Audio calls
- Real-time messaging
- File storage and sharing
Until recently, you needed an Office 365 business subscription to access Teams, but when Microsoft renamed that platform to Microsoft 365, they also began offering a free version of teams for anyone – home and business users.
While you can do even more with Teams with a Microsoft 365 subscription, there’s plenty of features available (including free cloud storage) when using the free version of Teams.
How to Get Starting Using Teams for Organized & Efficient Connections
First, we’ll go over what you get with Microsoft Team, then we’ll get into the basics of how to use Teams. It’s easier than you may think!
The features that Teams offers that can power online communication for everything from a fully remote business to your local HOA or soccer club. These include:
- Unlimited chat and search (makes it easy to find past conversions and share files)
- Online meetings and video calls (including things like background blur and screen sharing)
- 10GB of team file storage and 2GB of personal storage per user
- Real-time collaboration with online office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
We’ll go through some of the most popular features below that you can start using as soon as you download Teams and sign up for an account.
Video Meetings
One of the most popular features in Teams by far is the video meeting capability. The ability to easily video conference has become a part of daily life post-pandemic.
Whether you use Teams with office huddle spaces or from your sofa to connect with family, the interface is easy to use and you can send anyone a link to join a meeting, they don’t have to have the app on their device.
To start or schedule a video conference just go to the Meetings icon in Teams and choose to “Meet now” or “Schedule a meeting.” You’ll be given a link that you can easily share with others to join your video call.
Set Up a Team
Your “Team” in Microsoft Teams can be a group of people, like your extended family members or your business departments. For example, a business might set up one team for the HR department and another for the marketing department.
When you create a team, it creates a dedicated chat channel within Teams for that group, which includes features like Tabs (we’ll get into that shortly) and group security.
You can set your team to private, request to join, or have everyone in a team automatically added by default.
To create your team you just go to the Teams icon and you can build your team from scratch or, if you already have groups or teams set up in Microsoft Office 365, you can use those to create a matching teams in Teams.
Chat and Share Files
There are two ways you can chat (i.e. message) with others in Teams. People sometimes get these confused, so it’s important to know which is private and which is public to your team.
You can do one-on-one private chats with users by clicking the Chat menu icon.
You can also chat within your teams, which means the chat will be seen by all members of that team. You do that in the Teams area.
Teams offers rich chat features including the ability to:
- Add and share files
- Use stickers, gifs, images, and emoticons
- Use @mentions to “ping” someone with an alert
- Use formatting like font style, color, quotes, bullets and more
At the top of each Team you also can use Tabs, which we’ll explain next.
Organize Group Resources with Tabs
At the top of each Team channel you have the ability to create tabs to different resources.
A way that this could be used for a business team:
- Add links to often visited websites
- Add files that the team uses
- Add apps that can be launched within teams for real-time collaboration
You could use the tabs feature for a family team in this way:
- Add a link to your family photo album
- Add a link to a document where you’re having everyone add their favorite recipe
- Add a tab for a calendar app for birthdays
You can add tabs for:
- Files
- PDFs
- Wikis
- Websites
- OneNote & other Office apps
- Multiple 3rd party apps
Optimize Your Cloud Workflows with Help from Quantum PC Services
Tools like Teams can completely transform business workflows and keep families connected in innovative ways. Let Quantum PC Services help you customize Teams, Microsoft 365, or another platform you use to ensure you’re making the most of it.
Contact us today to learn more! Call 920-256-1214 or reach us online.
