Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork, a chat-based workspace that enables teams to be more productive by giving them a single and secure location that brings together everything a team needs: chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools. Microsoft Teams is one place for all the needs your teams have.
Microsoft Teams delivers on four core promises to create a digital workspace for high performing teams.
Communicate
First, Microsoft Teams solves for the communication needs of a diverse workforce.
Since preview, Microsoft Teams has evolved to include a complete meetings experience, as well as chat, voice and video –
You can use Teams for informal 1:1 or group chats – directly on your phone if you’re on the go. Or you can have an open conversation in a channel. This enables people to share information in a transparent way to accelerate decision making. And it’s super easy to move from a chat into a face to face meeting, helping you to bridge geographical barriers.
Collaborate
When it comes to collaboration, the deep Office integration enables today’s multigenerational workforce to use the Office apps they are familiar with and love – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner, even Power BI – right within the context of Teams. Teams is unique in how we enable collaboration.
Today, when you want somebody’s feedback, you send them the file via email, they store it locally with comments, you store it again…… it’s a vicious cycle that results in v2, v3, v4 versions – and you have to jump between email and other apps to get the work done. Teams brings all the Office 365 services together – so that you can easily share and co-author files without the need for email attachments.
Customize
Many of you use other services than Office 365 as well which results in you having to jump between and spend time in disparate experiences. We built Teams to not only be the hub for Office 365 services, but for all the services and tools teams use on a day to day basis. So, you can customize Teams with tabs, connector and bots to include the apps and services you need – <mention relevant 3rd party apps like GitHub and Trello that can be included in Teams>– we have integrations with over 150 partners. For our developer community, we have also created an extensible platform, to enable building apps and to integrate with business processes.
Work with Confidence
Microsoft Teams comes with the enterprise grade security, compliance and manageability that you expect from Office 365 which customers tell us is a huge value add for them.
Microsoft Teams provides a shared workspace that enables teams to communicate without effort through chats – across geographical boundaries.
Communicate Through Chat
Chats are threaded, persistent and contextual allowing your team to stay in the know and easily understand the context of the conversation.
Today, teams are dynamic. Members, roles, priorities and goals can change, resulting in different communication needs.
In Teams, people can choose how to communicate. They can engage in private 1:1: chats, in group chats or in team conversations that are visible to the entire team. Team conversations are open by default. Working in the open has a transformative effect on the culture of a team and helps organizations move from personal to team productivity.
We have recently added guest access, so you can now chat with everyone on your team, whether they’re inside your organization or an outside partner.
Teams allows you to have fun together. Successful collaboration is based on relationships. So, people can include emojis, memes and fun graphics in messages, which allows them to show their personality, and humanize messages.
Most teams have a fun channel to communicate about other topics than work. For example, when somebody joins the team, or has a baby – you can get to know the people beyond work interactions creating a culture of teamwork.
You can also use gifs, stickers, emojis to bring humor into the communication, and to soften messages. Changing the communication style can change the style of a team. You can worry less about formalities and focus more on the substance.
Integrated with Office 365
Information often lives across siloed services today – like mail, files, meetings, PowerBI/ data, other SaaS services.
Teams is a hub both for communication and collaboration that brings all these services together in one single workspace. So, teams have one less place to go to resulting in more time for productivity as you do not have to toggle between apps.
All your common tools, all the Office apps that people use every day – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, even Power BI – are all built-in, giving people access to the files and tools they need right within Microsoft Teams.
Users can share, co-author and edit Office and other files right in the app. As all files are stored on SharePoint, the latest version of the file is always accessible to any member on the team. This enables organizations to democratize knowledge and give everybody access to the information they need to get their work done.
You can take notes with OneNote or access an integrated calendar from Outlook.
Microsoft Teams is also integrated with SharePoint, PowerBI and planner, so teams can work in a central place with all the necessary tools to pursue team objectives.
We’ve built integration with email, so users can forward an email into a Team’s channel for further discussion.
Microsoft Teams leverages the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph. A team member can access org chart information and do searches for contacts within an organization.
Customize & Extend Collaboration
Every group is unique – both in structure and in style – so we have made it easy for teams to tailor their workspace to their needs and to include apps and services which are relevant to their team or project.
You can set up your channels so that conversations on certain topics happen in designated spaces. You can pin important files for quick reference for the whole team to access them in just one click.
You can add intelligent bots to interact with Microsoft Teams. Bots can answer natural-language questions and perform lightweight tasks such as FAQs.
You can bring in cloud services to explore data and get updates from Microsoft apps and 3rd party apps. Where 3rd party services are included, notifications can be customized so the team never misses a beat.
To bring our users a breadth of customization options, we’re working with more than 150 partners.
We have also created an extensible platform, to enable building apps with a rich set of capabilities to enable higher-performing teams. The Microsoft Teams developer platform enables integrations to your existing business process through publicly available APIs. IT can manage trusted apps for the employees and the organization.
Interested in Boosting Productivity & Collaboration via Microsoft Teams? Click here to request your Free, No-Obligation Microsoft Teams Strategy Session
Stay connected while remote with Microsoft Teams
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