Microsoft Teams is the flagship collaboration tool used by most companies in the world, having achieved unprecedented success. However, Microsoft is not satisfied “only” with that and in recent months has accelerated the evolution of Teams relentlessly including many capabilities that allow companies to offer a more modern and secure workplace for their employees and integrating, thanks to rest of the products included in Microsoft 365, possibilities such as digitization and automation of processes, thus improving the productivity and efficiency of the entire organization. In short, Teams together with Microsoft 365, have become a platform that simplifies the complex machinery of any organization, thus promoting the digital transformation of companies . In this article, we show you a very summarized and updated photo of what Microsoft Teams allows today, as an introduction and appetizer to the next webinar in which we will show you in detail the most interesting news that it brings us!
As most of you know, Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft 365 chat-based workspace designed to improve communication and collaboration of work teams in organizations, reinforcing the collaborative functions of the Microsoft cloud platform. Since its launch to the general public more than 3 years ago, about 155 million users for more than 600,000 companies have discovered teamwork thanks to Teams.
Teams is naturally integrated with Microsoft 365 and based on Microsoft 365 Groups, the transversal service for collaboration between users. The tool brings together in a common space the collaboration applications necessary to work as a team and with which you can work with: individual and group chats, team conversations, videoconferences, notes, access to shared content, Office Online, Planner and other features that we review in this article.
An extensible and customizable work center for teams
Microsoft Teams offers the possibility of using Microsoft 365 applications by customizing the environment according to the needs of your team. With Teams, team users can:
- Conduct group or private chats to have group conversations with few members.
- Create work teams to hold conversations with specific groups of people on specific topics, as well as to share information and files.
- View content and chat history from the beginning of the conversation and at any time.
- Start video and / or voice meetings with up to 300 people simultaneously.
- Conduct live streaming events for audiences of up to 10,000 people.
- Get instant access to all shared content, collaboration tools, users, and conversations across teams’ channels and their tabs.
- Add shortcuts to frequently used documents, websites, and applications, both for yourself and for work teams.
- Access to notes and documents thanks to integration with OneNote and SharePoint Online.
- Work with Office Online documents directly from Teams.
- Plan tasks thanks to the integration with Planner, the Microsoft 365 task manager.
- Add Power BI reports.
- Enjoy a common workspace with a web interface and for mobile devices.
- Being group-based, it allows the user to move from one collaboration platform to another easily.
- Add platform-specific applications, such as Yammer, and third-party services, such as RSS feeds, Bing News Feed, or Twitter.
Organizational and business processes hub
Microsoft Teams, among other functionalities, also allows the organization’s business processes to be integrated into work teams thanks to the additional task management and approval tools offered by Microsoft Teams.
Approvals in Microsoft Teams allow everyone from frontline workers to corporate headquarters employees to easily create, manage, and share approvals from one place.
On the other hand, the Teams service allows integrating the organization’s own applications, whether they are developed in code and deployed by the company itself, or implemented with the Power Platform tools.
Guest access
Since its launch more than 3 years ago, Microsoft has continued to work to improve the tool and respond to user requests. One of the most applauded is access to guests and external collaborators. With this functionality, Office 365 users can add people from outside their organization to the team so they can participate in team conversations, join meetings, or collaborate on documents within the organization’s Teams environment, among many other functions. .
Guest accounts are added and managed through Azure AD through B2B collaboration, offering businesses the highest level of security and granularity.
A safe workspace
Microsoft Teams provides the business security and compliance features that Microsoft 365 offers its customers:
- Wide compatibility with compliance standards.
- Data encryption at all times, at rest and in transit.
- Multi-factor authentication for improved identity protection.
- Detection of confidential information and conflicting conversations.
Teams is included in the Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Business plans.
As we already advanced when we published the first article on Microsoft Teams, this communication and collaboration tool has significantly improved the way teams work and, consequently, their productivity.
The journey of Microsoft Teams is still long and the wide variety of innovations that are incorporated each month to the service offer a new world of possibilities for the digitization of organizations.
Get the most out of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 tools with Minerva
At Softeng we want to help people boost their digital skills by improving their abilities in the use of modern and efficient tools such as Microsoft Teams, for this reason we have created Minerva.
Minerva is an application developed by Softeng, and integrated into Microsoft Teams, aimed at self-learning the services and functionalities of Microsoft 365, as well as some tips and recommendations to be more productive and work more safely in your day-to-day.
The application offers content prepared by Softeng with a high production quality and made with professional tools. The materials are mostly videos of very short duration (3 minutes on average) and oriented to very practical and simple use cases so that the user can quickly learn the most important functionalities of each of the Microsoft 365 tools.
As we told you at the beginning of this article, we are working on a digital event in which we will show you in detail the most interesting news of Microsoft Teams. In a few days we will announce the date so stay tuned to our social networks ?
Do you want to know more about Teams and our Minerva training portal? Contact us!