Encourage team communication and collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Since purchasing Skype, Microsoft has sought to create better ways to manage business related meetings remotely. Skype itself was largely maintained and only slightly modified, but Skype’s business centered application, Skype for Business, was partially integrated into Microsoft’s new program, Microsoft Teams. While Skype for Business still exists, all development effort was shifted into Teams and Microsoft learned quite a lot about handling phone systems from Skype for Business. Teams has a wide variety of tools that help connect businesses with their customers and with themselves.

One of the core features of Microsoft Teams is the ability to create Teams to help manage the various data that a project team or other internal team might require. This blog will help explain some of the functionality of the Site feature of Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams was a huge improvement over the more barebones Skype for Business of the past. While Skype for Business covered internal instant messaging, calling, and meeting management, the application itself didn’t focus on how a company might operate internally. Microsoft Teams, however, was developed precisely to bring that functionality and manage internal teams effectively. Teams are a huge part of this effort.  During the coronavirus outbreak, Microsoft has offered free Teams licenses for anyone who needs help working remotely. Syvantis uses Microsoft Teams internally for most of our communication and organization needs. We use our experiences to help other organizations implement and train their staff to use Teams effectively.,

Within Microsoft Teams, Teams are the highest level of organizations for groups of users. Teams can be used to communicate with groups of people, store relevant group files, or even just post notifications. Typically we see Teams be created for departments, project teams,  specific office location staff, or group interests, but Teams can be created for just about any group type.

To create a Team in Microsoft Teams, use the left navigation to select the Teams option. Again on the left, at the very bottom there will be an option to create an entirely new Team or join an existing one. Selecting this option will bring up all existing teams in the company. Selecting the create a team option will bring up a screen which allows for the members of the Team to be selected.

If a group of users exists already in Office 365 or if a group of users is already in a Team, they can be re-selected using the create from option. Otherwise, build a team from scratch will do exactly that. The next prompt asks whether the team will be private or public for the organization. If a Team doesn’t require official internal recognition, or if it deals with confidential information, one can select private. The other option allows anyone in the organization to join and leave as they wish. After that choice, the Team must be given a name and an optional description which can help others recognize what the Team is for. After all description fields are complete, the create option can be selected and the Team will be created when it is selected. Finally, an option to add users to the Team will appear which can be done by filling out the lookup for whoever is to be added.

The Team’s page itself starts off relatively empty but can be modified extensively to fit the need of whatever the Team’s intended purpose is. The primary way that the Team can be modified is through use of the Tab functionality and the Channel functionality. A Channel is the primary subdivision of a Team and can be used to manage different sections of the overall Team itself. If the Team is relatively large, there may be many Channels, but for most Teams the default “General” Channel will suffice. To add a Channel, use the ellipses on the left navigation for the Team you wish to add a Channel to.

Tabs are the primary subdivision of a Channel. Each Channel can be broken down into individual Tabs which add the real functionality to the Channel. Tabs are seen next to the name of the Team when the Team’s page is selected and start off with only a few base choices. The Posts tab is just an Instant Messaging feed where the Team members can speak to each other or make larger posts to the whole Team. In our internal Teams, Posts is used for updating members on new changes to policies, completion of work items, or to provide other updates for the Team as a whole. The next default Tab, Files, is used to manage file sharing for the Team. This can almost be thought of as a miniature SharePoint or a shared OneDrive folder, that is even easier and well organized than some of those other file sharing options. The final Tab is the Wiki tab which allows for management of postings to the group. We use it to write out important information that pertains to what we’re working on and how to use projects when they are in development.

The flexibility of Tabs isn’t fully explored until adding custom Tabs to a Team. If the plus arrow is selected, a prompt for adding a new Tab will be provided. At this point, the user is bombarded with the sheer amount of apps that are integrated into Microsoft Teams. This is the place where Teams really shines since there are more than 50 integrations to choose from. Not only are you provided with integration into Microsoft apps, there are many additional external apps that can be brought in to work on. Syvantis utilizes a wide variety of apps in our Teams ranging from Microsoft’s DevOps boards, which allow for easy task management, to Microsoft SharePoint pages that can bring in an entire page and have it hosted inside Teams. There are so many handy non-Microsoft apps that can be affiliated to Teams as well. Some well known names like Adobe Creative Cloud and YouTube can be integrated easily using the Tab functionality. To see all the apps that can be brought into Teams, select the more apps option to sort through the laundry list of connections that Teams has. While in the Apps screen, you can also see helpful bots, and Connectors which allow for automated messages to be sent to the Team in order to notify the Team.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of functionality that Microsoft Teams provides to its users. There’s actually a whole lot more that Teams can do including integrating the entire phone system of a company, providing instant messaging between all users, managing meetings, and providing video chat that can help make the distance working remotely or from multiple locations a whole lot shorter. Syvantis has three locations and without Teams it would be nearly impossible to quickly coordinate between places without the functionality that Teams provides. If you or someone you know is having trouble working remotely during these strange times, Syvantis may be able to assist with providing free licenses to your users.