If you are new to Microsoft Teams and are looking for help, you have come to the right place. Let’s first talk a little about what Teams is and what is all buzz about. Microsoft created Teams as part of its wildly popular Office 365 suite of business programs. It is primarily a communications tool, but it is also so much more.
It is designed to link people together in order to collaborate on projects. It allows remote meetings to be scheduled, screens to be shared, and files to be stored and shared. Since it is part of the Office 365 platform, it can be used in conjunction with all of the Microsoft productivity programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Since Microsoft first released Microsoft Teams, the number of daily users has ballooned to more than 140 million users. As businesses had to figure out how to get the most productivity out of their workers under some of the most difficult circumstances.
For this blog post, we have decided to come up with some very effective tips that anyone can follow in order to get the most out of Microsoft Teams.
Don’t use duplicate team names
Naming your teams is very important to keep things focused. However, you want to avoid using duplicate names. Try to be unique as possible without being too complex either.
Be sure to choose the correct options
One thing you will notice about Teams is that is divided into two sections Chat and Teams. You can use this to your advantage by training your people to use the chat for one-on-one messaging and using the Teams for group discussions and collaborations. This will help keep it better organised for your organisation
Make good use of private groups
When you are first introducing Teams to your organisation you should always make the most important groups private. This will help to keep things more focused for them. That way only things applicable to their specific tasks and projects will be accessible to them. It will make training them on how to best use Teams a lot easier for them and for you.
Be sure to discuss file and folder-sharing features
File-sharing is a very big part of what makes Microsoft Teams such a powerful collaboration tool. However, unless you make all of your employees familiar with how file sharing works, they may not see the benefits. Teams uses Microsoft Sharepoint to handle all of the storage of the data files. This means you will need to train your staff on how to access the folders and files that are created by other team members.
Use notifications wisely
Notifications are quite valuable, however, if your organisation is large, you just might be overwhelmed with all of the notifications coming into your console. Fortunately, the console has a way for you to change how you receive notifications. If you go into Settings in the console you can pick and choose which notifications you receive and you can also get emails with summaries of the notifications at different intervals.
Use Notes whenever possible
Microsoft Notes is the perfect companion software to go along with Teams. You can use it to take and share notes from meetings or other collaboration projects. The notes can be taken and put into folders within notebooks. The notebooks can be used to hold other files such as multimedia-type files and everyone in the group can access the folders and files.
Use the background feature for your video calls
Chances are not many people will have the perfect office setting for a video call. So, to help with that Teams comes with an instant background that you can select from a wide range of unique background settings. While setting up the Teams you can select the background that you want to be used. By clicking on the three dots on the screen before entering the meeting, you can choose what background option.
Utilise @mentions
When you need to grab someone’s attention in a conversation or channel, use the @mention feature by typing “@” followed by their name. This will send them a notification and ensure they see your message.
Get started with Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Support
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