Microsoft Teams: The Ultimate Collaboration Tool
Introduction
Okay guys, check this out. A text message, an email, and a chat client walk into a bar. What happens? They make Microsoft Teams. Oh my gosh, this is one of the most transforming applications out there. Stay tuned, I'll show you what it's all about. Seriously.
The Concept of Microsoft Teams
Hey guys, I'm Neadom Tucker, owner of Kotori Technologies. And yes, today we're going to talk about if a text message, email, and chat messenger went into a bar and had a baby, what would we get? We would have Microsoft Teams.
I think this is one of the best products in Microsoft to come out in a long time for what it does for a business. So, let's talk about it.
You know, in today's terms, you've got a lot of employees that like to text message back and forth or use group text messages. That's really okay, but I'll be honest, it's kind of annoying to get the buzz every time you're getting a message.
How do you also keep new members to the team involved in what you're doing? This is where Teams does a really great job giving you a historical conversation of what's happened.
Historical Conversations
The beautiful part about a team is that you can build multiple what we call channels inside of a team. So, let's take, for example, an operations Department that has an operational team inside of Teams. We can break that operational channel into maybe onboarding, off-boarding, deliveries, or whatever we want to build into that. Those can be individual conversations about those things within that part of the department.
Maybe HR has a team and we're going to talk about new hires, terminations, write-ups, or whatever. We can keep all that information secure but have it in one section, which we can go back and look at historical conversations. Honestly, the back and forth of emails can get kind of tedious. Teams works really well in that aspect keeping the conversation and the history of that conversation all in one place for you.
File Management in Teams
Not only can we do historical conversations, but we also have the ability to manage files inside of Teams. Think about this: let's say you're going to share a resume with somebody. If you're sticking to this HR example, you might share a resume with one of your team members and say, “Hey, take a look at this resume. I want your input.”
You can put that in the conversation and have a discussion. If you're fully in Office 365, you could actually open that document and have a conversation inside the document with Teams. You can chat back and forth. It ties everything together.
You can then see the conversation about that document inside of Teams. Having conversations about documents or working together and collaborating is a really big point.
The file management portion of Teams gives you the ability to have all of those files regarding that team inside that channel. It builds the folder structure for you. Inside of Teams, you get a SharePoint-like environment. You may have a folder for the team called HR, and then a folder for new hires as another piece. That would be a separate folder for that channel, and those files would be under it.
This gives you one place to find everything. Later on, if you want to search through the conversation to find the file, you can click on “Files” and see the files regarding that channel. Really simple to manage.
Face-to-Face Communication
Communicating face-to-face with somebody is the best form of communication. It's really hard to do that through text messages and emails. Having a face-to-face conversation removes the undertones of an email. Putting things in all caps might make it sound disrespectful, even if it wasn’t meant that way.
Having a face-to-face conversation is really important in communicating with your employees. Teams makes this really easy. It gives you the ability to make a phone call or a video chat back and forth. You can just click on the camera button. If you've got a camera and microphone on your computer, you can start the video chat. You can do it from your cell phone as well. It works really simply.
It doesn’t matter if you have an Android or an iPhone you have communication and collaboration made simple. You can do a group meeting to have a conversation. You can meet in a particular channel inside of Teams or in a specific group to have those meetings and set them aside.
Video allows you to stay connected better and have a better one-on-one interaction with your team members.
Sense of Community
All of these features culminate into one thing: a sense of community. We've got clients with offices in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Mexico really, all over. Keeping all of these people connected so they feel like one team is really important.
Your mission, vision, and values, many organizations put a lot of time and effort into those. Teams helps you bring your culture together and make it a cohesive thing inside your organization.
Conclusion
So, to sum it up, we talked about four things today about Microsoft Teams:
- Historical conversations to keep everybody in the loop, even new hires.
- File management inside of Teams.
- Video conversations and video chat.
- A sense of community.
All of these features within Teams really help an organization stay connected with their team members and employees.
Well guys, that sums it up. I hope you had a great week. We'll see you next week. Have a great time! If there's anything we can help with, visit us online at http://www.kotortechnologies.com
