Microsoft have been adding lots of new features and applications to Office 365, such as Planner,Shifts and Microsoft Teams.
Taking on the likes of Slack, Microsoft describe Teams as a ‘chat-based workspace in Office 365' allowing teams (internal only at this stage) to work together within one window to enhance teamwork. It's important to note that Microsoft Teams will be replacing Skype for Business (which will be retired 31st July 2021).
If you need any support adopting Microsoft Teams, please see our Microsoft Teams Services. You can also download this Quick Start PDF guide to give end users all the basics.
Microsoft Teams for Education Help drive the transition to inclusive online or hybrid learning, build confidence with remote learning tools, and maintain student engagement. Microsoft Teams is available to users who have licenses with following Office 365 corporate subscriptions: E1, E3, E5, Business Premium, and Business Essentials. In the education plans, it is available in the A1, A1 Plus, A5, and A3 subscriptions. Plans are in place to roll out Teams in the government cloud. Teams can be accessed.
Need Teams governance guidance? Watch our on-demand recording of 'Managing Microsoft Teams' to see how to administer and govern Microsoft Teams.
What does Teams do?
'Whether it's connecting from different devices with a unified calling solution, sharing documents, co-authoring files, hosting video meetings, streamlining workflows, creating apps in Microsoft Power Platform—Teams is a platform where everything happens.'. Collaborate for free with online versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, in OneDrive.
Within one window, users can call upon a variety of key Office 365 apps and tools to help them work more effectively, such as:
![In Microsoft Teams In Microsoft Teams](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/2016/media/11_02_10.png)
- Calendars and meetings (Outlook)
- Create, share, edit and find content (SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote)
- Call and meet team members (Skype)
- Chat and instant messaging (Skype)
Key benefits of Teams
- One centralised hub
- Office 365 integration
- Customise Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
- Enterprise security & compliance
- Azure Active Directory integration
- No extra cost to Office 365 users
Using Teams
Before getting started it's important to understand how Teams fits into the larger Office 365 picture, as creating Teams has some wider implications. Every Team created will automatically create a matching Plan (find out more on this in our Guide to Planner here), SharePoint Team Site, Office 365 Group and shared OneNote. While this brings a number of great benefits, such as shared documents and centralised team information, it can cause some governance and admin headaches. Luckily, the admin side of Teams allows this to be managed as we'll cover below.
Overview
Once your organisation has access to Teams, you can: download the desktop application, access Teams through your browser or download the mobile app.
Teams and Channels
To start your teamwork collaboration, you need a team. Setting up Teams is easy and done in a few clicks, requiring a Team name and a description; this then allows team members to be added. As mentioned above, a new Team will create a matching Office 365 Group, OneNote, SharePoint site and Plan—so this does need to be done with some caution.
Each Team has subsections, which are called Channels, and a General Channel will automatically be created. You can have multiple Channels within a Team; for example, you could have a 'Marketing' Team and then Channels such as 'Social Media', 'Product Launch', 'Blogs' etc. Or a Company could be a Team and Channels can relate to departments - you can choose whatever suits your organisation's way of working. Whenever there is a new notification or activity, the Channel will become bold.
Channel Tabs
Each Channel all have their own tabs along the top. Conversation (group chat), Files (shared documents) and Notes (shared OneNote) are automatically created and you can then add your own tabs.
Conversation
Conversations are one of the key features of Teams, allowing each Team to have a centralised discussion that is saved and easily searchable. Conversations are the central component where all teamwork is recorded—from file sharing to video calls.
The use of @mentions allows you to tag participants or even whole teams to notify others. Users that look at Conversations will easily see where they have been mentioned through the red @ symbol to highlight areas of importance to them. On top of this, your desktop app will notify you through an alert. As well as tagging, users can 'like' content and share emoticons or GIFs.
Files
In Microsoft Teams
In your Teams window, you can perform a variety of tasks directly within that window or browser, so that you avoid flicking between different applications. These tasks include the ability to delete, download, move files, open, copy, edit or get a link to share with others – giving you all the key features you would get in the native apps.
You can also start a Group chat alongside the file, to allow team discussions while all working on the files - and this conversation will appear in your Conversation thread.
View team files, edit, upload and create
Notes
Notes takes you to the Team shared OneNote. Within Teams you can view and edit your OneNotes (directly within the Teams window) or you can click to edit in the OneNote app.
Edit within Teams
Edit in OneNote
![Create Create](https://contosoedu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/PointDrive-Teams2.jpg)
- Calendars and meetings (Outlook)
- Create, share, edit and find content (SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote)
- Call and meet team members (Skype)
- Chat and instant messaging (Skype)
Key benefits of Teams
- One centralised hub
- Office 365 integration
- Customise Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
- Enterprise security & compliance
- Azure Active Directory integration
- No extra cost to Office 365 users
Using Teams
Before getting started it's important to understand how Teams fits into the larger Office 365 picture, as creating Teams has some wider implications. Every Team created will automatically create a matching Plan (find out more on this in our Guide to Planner here), SharePoint Team Site, Office 365 Group and shared OneNote. While this brings a number of great benefits, such as shared documents and centralised team information, it can cause some governance and admin headaches. Luckily, the admin side of Teams allows this to be managed as we'll cover below.
Overview
Once your organisation has access to Teams, you can: download the desktop application, access Teams through your browser or download the mobile app.
Teams and Channels
To start your teamwork collaboration, you need a team. Setting up Teams is easy and done in a few clicks, requiring a Team name and a description; this then allows team members to be added. As mentioned above, a new Team will create a matching Office 365 Group, OneNote, SharePoint site and Plan—so this does need to be done with some caution.
Each Team has subsections, which are called Channels, and a General Channel will automatically be created. You can have multiple Channels within a Team; for example, you could have a 'Marketing' Team and then Channels such as 'Social Media', 'Product Launch', 'Blogs' etc. Or a Company could be a Team and Channels can relate to departments - you can choose whatever suits your organisation's way of working. Whenever there is a new notification or activity, the Channel will become bold.
Channel Tabs
Each Channel all have their own tabs along the top. Conversation (group chat), Files (shared documents) and Notes (shared OneNote) are automatically created and you can then add your own tabs.
Conversation
Conversations are one of the key features of Teams, allowing each Team to have a centralised discussion that is saved and easily searchable. Conversations are the central component where all teamwork is recorded—from file sharing to video calls.
The use of @mentions allows you to tag participants or even whole teams to notify others. Users that look at Conversations will easily see where they have been mentioned through the red @ symbol to highlight areas of importance to them. On top of this, your desktop app will notify you through an alert. As well as tagging, users can 'like' content and share emoticons or GIFs.
Files
In Microsoft Teams
In your Teams window, you can perform a variety of tasks directly within that window or browser, so that you avoid flicking between different applications. These tasks include the ability to delete, download, move files, open, copy, edit or get a link to share with others – giving you all the key features you would get in the native apps.
You can also start a Group chat alongside the file, to allow team discussions while all working on the files - and this conversation will appear in your Conversation thread.
View team files, edit, upload and create
Notes
Notes takes you to the Team shared OneNote. Within Teams you can view and edit your OneNotes (directly within the Teams window) or you can click to edit in the OneNote app.
Edit within Teams
Edit in OneNote
Adding Tabs
As mentioned, as well as these three automatic tabs you can also add your own, which currently include Planner, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Power BI dashboards and more.
Microsoft products can easily be added now, but there are also many future integrations coming to Teams, such as Asana integration. With integration between systems being so vital to teamwork, we can expect to see many more partnerships and out-of-the-box integrations!
Asana Integration
Menu
Along the left-hand side you can navigate to different areas within Teams, such as Chats, Meetings, Files and Activity. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory:
Activities: Shows you the last activities of the Teams that you are part of.
Chat: This holds your Skype for Business conversations, providing a complete chat history. However, for a chat within a Team you should use the Teams menu and hold the group chat in 'Conversation'.
Teams: An overview of all your Teams that you are part of and allows you to drill-down into each Channel within the Teams. This is also where you can create Teams.
Meetings: The Meetings tab pulls your meetings in from Outlook and also allows you schedule meetings within the Meetings tab that are sent to a Team. If you want to schedule other meetings with external users or individuals, you will still need to use Outlook, as the Teams Meeting tab is only to schedule a meeting with a Team. (Remember the aim is team collaboration, not calendar management).
Files: Within Files you can quickly find and view files across OneNote, OneDrive and within Teams (stored in their own SharePoint sites). There's also a very helpful ‘Recent' tab so you can quickly access the latest documents you were working on, as well as a shortcut to your Downloads.
Admin
Microsoft Teams is a great product already as it allows great flexibility and gives you many possibilities. However, as mentioned earlier, getting started with Teams can also bring some knock-on effects, which can cause admin headaches. Luckily, within the Office 365 Admin, you can control Teams settings within the Groups control panel. Within Admin settings, you can control who can create teams, what features are or are not allowed, such as video meetings, screen sharing or animated images or if extensions can be used. This gives the control required to allow governance in line with your organisation's policy and ensures you can keep control over the app. Find out more here.
End User Adoption Guides
To find out how you can use Microsoft Teams Live Events to easily stream live events such as webinars, product demos or corporate presentations to external and internal audiences, read our 'How to use Microsoft Teams Live Events' guide.
For organisations with employees working on shift patterns, Shifts in Microsoft Teams provides shift scheduling and management capabilities. Find out more with our 'How to use Shifts in Microsoft Teams' guide.
There are also some great end-user adoption guides available online from Microsoft.
To learn how to use the meetings and calls functionality of Teams, you can take a look at these Meeting and Calling How-Tos.
A Microsoft Teams End User Quick Start Guide is also available to download and share with users.
FAQs
Is Teams available now? Yes - Teams is generally available.
Which Office 365 Plans include Teams? Teams is available to Business Essentials, Business Premium, F1, E1, E3, E4 (retired) and E5 customers. It's also available for Education and Non-profit plans but not yet Government.
What is on the Teams roadmap? You can view the full Teams roadmap here.
What about Skype for Business? Teams will be replacing Skype for Business! Find out more here.
Does Teams work with those outside your organisation? Yes - this feature was added and can be turned on or off. Guest access is included with all Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Enterprise, and Office 365 Education subscriptions. No additional Office 365 license is necessary. Guest access is a tenant-level setting in Microsoft Teams and is turned off by default. Find out more here.
Conclusion
Microsoft Teams is already a robust offering and is benefiting from lots of new features and integrations. Even better, since Microsoft's new direction under Satya Nadella, feedback and reviews on products have been well received with Microsoft actively acting upon public feedback. Microsoft Teams has a simple feedback program and you can go and view most popular suggestions, as well as see which ones are planned based on the number of up-votes. These requests and other features can then be seen on the public Office 365 Roadmap. This really shows a commitment to making a product aimed at user needs, so we have a great feeling about Microsoft Teams. What's more, seeing as Teams will be replacing Skype for Business we are sure that it will become well used!
Media coverage and reception has also been very positive with many Slack comparisons. Within these comparisons, Microsoft Teams is often faring very well in terms of features, usability and offering—but what makes it even more appealing is the fact that is it included with Office 365. For Office 365 users, this means that those who are already using other paid teamwork software can remove the licence expense, and those that aren't can gain access to a useful new application that competitors might be using - at no extra cost.
Next steps
If you are using Office 365, then we recommend trying Teams and providing your feedback to help shape the product. You can download a Quick Start PDF guide to get users started here.
If you are not using Office 365, then you can sign up for an Office 365 E3 trial (which includes Teams).
You can also find out how we can help with our Microsoft Teams Services or Contact Us and we can give an Office 365 demo or answer any questions.
-->Note
Review the following information to understand chat, teams, channels, & apps in Teams. Then, go to Chat, teams, channels, & apps in Teams to walk through a list of decisions important to your Teams rollout.
Let's get started by thinking about how Microsoft Teams allows individual teams to self-organize and collaborate across business scenarios:
Teams are a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization.
- Teams can be created to be private to only invited users.
- Teams can also be created to be public and open and anyone within the organization can join (up to 10,000 members).
A team is designed to bring together a group of people who work closely to get things done. Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations). Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.
Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—-whatever works for your team! Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint. To learn more, read How SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business interact with Teams.
- Channels are places where conversations happen and where the work actually gets done. Channels can be open to all team members or, if you need a more select audience, they can be private. Standard channels are for conversations that everyone in a team can participate in and private channels limit communication to a subset of people in a team.
- Channels are most valuable when extended with apps that include tabs, connectors, and bots that increase their value to the members of the team. To learn more, see Apps, bots, & connectors in Teams.
For help using teams and channels, check out Teams and channels.
View this short video to learn more about best practices for creating teams and channels.
Membership, roles, and settings
Team membership
When Microsoft Teams is activated for your entire organization, designated team owners can invite any employee they work with to join their team. Microsoft Teams makes it easy for team owners to add people in the organization based on their name. Depending on your organization's settings guests who are team members but outside of your organization can also be added to your teams. See Guest Access in Microsoft Teams for more information.
Team owners can also create a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group. Any changes made to the group will be synced with Microsoft Teams automatically. Creating a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group not only simplifies the process of inviting and managing members, but also syncs group files inside of Microsoft Teams.
Team roles
There are two main roles in Microsoft Teams:
- Team owner - The person who creates the team. Team owners can make any member of their team a co-owner when they invite them to the team or at any point after they've joined the team. Having multiple team owners lets you share the responsibilities of managing settings and membership, including invitations.
- Team members - The people who the owners invite to join their team.
In addition, if moderation is set up, team owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel. Moderators can start new posts in the channel and control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages. Team owners can assign moderators within a channel. (Team owners have moderator capabilities by default.) Moderators within a channel can add or remove other moderators within that channel. For more information, see Set up and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams.
Team settings
Team owners can manage team-wide settings directly in Microsoft Teams. Settings include the ability to add a team picture, set permissions across team members for creating standard and private channels, adding tabs and connectors, @mentioning the entire team or channel, and the usage of GIFs, stickers, and memes.
Take three minutes to check out this go-to-guide video for team owners:
If you are a Microsoft Teams administrator in Microsoft 365 or Office 365, you have access to system-wide settings in the Microsoft Teams admin center. These settings can impact the options and defaults team owners see under team settings. For example, you can enable a default channel, 'General', for team-wide announcements, discussions, and resources, which will appear across all teams.
By default, all users have permissions to create a team within Microsoft Teams (to modify this, see Assign roles and permissions in Teams. Users of an existing Microsoft 365 group can also enhance their permissions with Teams functionality.
One key early planning activity to engage users with Microsoft Teams is to help people think and understand how Teams can enhance collaboration in their day to day lives. Talk with people and help them select business scenarios where they are currently collaborating in fragmented ways. Bring them together in a channel with the relevant tabs that will help them get their work done. One of the most powerful use cases of Teams is any cross-organizational process.
Example Teams
Below are a few functional examples of how different types of users may approach setting up their teams, channels, and apps (tabs/connectors/bots). This may be useful to help kick off a conversation about Microsoft Teams with your user community. As you think about how to implement Microsoft Teams in your organization, remember that you can provide guidance on how to structure their teams; however, users have control of how they can self-organize. These are just examples to help get teams to start thinking through the possibilities.
Microsoft Teams is great for breaking down organizational silos and promoting cross-functional teams, so encourage your users to think about functional teams rather than organizational boundaries.
Types of Teams | Potential Channels | Apps (Tabs /Connectors /Bots ) |
---|---|---|
Sales | Annual Sales Meeting Quarterly Business Review Monthly Sales Pipeline Review Sales Playbook | Power BI Trello CRM Summarize Bot |
Public Relations | Press Releases News and Updates Fact Checking | RSS Feed |
Event Planning | Marketing Logistics and Scheduling Venue Budget | Twitter Planner |
Marketing/Go to Market | Market Research Messaging Pillars Communications Plan Marketing Bill of Materials | YouTube Microsoft Stream MailChimp |
Technical Operations | Incident Management Sprint Planning Work Items Infrastructure and Operations | Team Services Jira AzureBot |
Product Team | Strategy Marketing Sales Operations Insights Services & Support | Power BI Team Services |
Finance | Current Fiscal FY Planning Forecasting Accounts Receivable Accounts Payable | Power BI Google Analytics |
Logistics | Warehouse Operations Vehicle Maintenance Driver Rosters | Weather Service Travel / Road Disruptions Planner Tubot UPS Bot |
HR | Talent Management Recruiting Performance Review Planning Morale | HR Tools External Job Posting Sites Growbot |
Cross-organizational Virtual Team | Strategy Workforce Development Compete & Research | Power BI Microsoft Stream |
It's possible to create Teams that align with the organizational structure. This is best used for leaders who want to drive morale, have team-specific reviews, clarify employee onboarding processes, discuss workforce plans, and increase visibility across a diverse workforce.
Log In Microsoft Teams Account
Org-wide teams
In Microsoft Teams How Do You Record A Video
If your organization has no more than 5,000 users, you can create an org-wide team. Org-wide teams provide an automatic way for everyone in an organization to be a part of a single team for collaboration. For more information, including best practices for creating and managing an org-wide team, see Create an org-wide team in Microsoft Teams.