Why use Office 365 Microsoft Teams

What is Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a free platform ( if you are an office 365 customer ) for communication and collaboration for teams inside your organisation to enable staff to interact better. Most organisations will have the following departments:

  • Finance
  • HR
  • IT
  • Sales
  • Marketing

Each of these departments and subteams will be communicating with each other currently using some form platform such as CCing Group Email , skype for business chat or phone calls.

Microsoft Teams enables you to use all the above methods and colloborate with documents at the same time.

Hows does it work

When you create a Microsoft Team for a department, it creates :

  • Sarepoint Site for Document Storage and live collaboration

  • A Team Mailbox for live Chat Communications
  • OneNote file for note collaboration.

 

You can then break down a Team into different Channels for example Different Projects inside a Department.

Best Features

Fully Synced Between your devices

Microsoft Teams can be accessed via

  • An installed Application on your Computer or Mac

  • The Web
  • An App on your phone with Push Notifications

Everything is synced between these so nothing is missed when using another device or on the move

Sync and collaborate on Files in Teams use External Providers such Dropbox/Box/Sharefile and Google Drive

 

Saving files

Each Channel in teams gets a specific email address, if your group is working from a shared mailbox , rather than forward that email to a group who then have to download it , you can forward it to your department channel and ask the question there.

Connectors

Connectors allow you to connect third party lists such as 

  • Twitter feeds
  • RSS Feeds
  • News

Into your teams site so its a one stop shop for information

Bots

You can intergrate helpful bots inside your chat windows for example

  • User : “Bot pull up sales figures for Customer Contoso “
  • Bot : “Beep Beep - Sum of sales from salesforce for Contoso X$”
  •  
  • User : “Bot does Customer Contoso have any outstanding amount due”
  • Bot : “Beep Beep - Xero shows Contoso has an outstanding amount of X$ overdue 5 days”

List of current bots available here : https://bots.botframework.com/ as well a a development library to program your own