With companies all over the world adjusting to the new remote work culture, they are looking for new ways to connect their teams and increase their productivity. One of the technologies that have been steadily rising this year has been Microsoft Teams. In fact, according to a recent report, there are 44 million people using teams on a regular basis. When we take a closer look at everything that Microsoft Teams offers, it is easy to see why it is so popular. Before we take a look at some of the things it has to offer, let’s first remind ourselves exactly what Microsoft Teams is.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app that not only connects both remote and internal teams but streamlines a lot of processes along the way. This is the biggest reason why Teams has surpassed some of its rivals, like Slack, because it just offers a lot more functionality than simple chat messages. You can host meetings, share files, make calls, sync your calendar, and a lot of other features. Since there are so many useful features inside Teams, we decided to share some of the most useful ones with you.
Create Conversation Channels
You can create a channel about any topic you wish which allows the conversation to stay on topic and keeps everything organized. If you need to go back and find certain information mentioned in the chat, you will not have to peruse your way through a lot of irrelevant information which also saves you a lot of time. If you would like to expand a conversation you can invite new people to join by using the @mention function. All of the small yet time-consuming tasks that you are doing in your current messaging system really snowballs and adds up to a big chunk of time that you are simply wasting. Microsoft Teams can help save you a significant portion of this time.
Less Reliance on Email
We all had a conversation via email where there are so many participants, replies, and attachments that can get difficult to keep track of what is going on and what the latest information is. Instead of using your inbox for communication, you can resolve any issues in the chat. One of the most interesting features of Teams is that you are able to send an email to the channel with the entire body of the email appearing in the thread for everybody to see. This also makes it a lot easier to search and find information since the contents of the chat is always saved, all of the attachments are in one place and all of the communication stays in one place.
Access All of Your Documents and Data in Other Office 365 Apps
One of the things people love about Microsoft Teams is that you never have to leave the app. You can access any document from SharePoint, OneDrive, Skype, and any other service offered by Office 365 all inside Teams. When you are working with projects that require a lot of documentation and communication, it is great to have everything in one place. This way, you will not have to conduct a search in your inbox to find an email, then open up SharePoint to find another document. Everything is accessible from one place and all of the time that you are saving will significantly increase your efficiency.
Keep Track of Attendance
While you can see all of the participants in a meeting from various virtual conferencing apps, not all of them keep track of attendance. For example, if you are the meeting administrator, you will be able to see who enters the virtual meeting room and at what time as well as when they left the meeting. Teams can also create a downloadable report for you that will list all of the attendance information as well. This is especially useful for educators who are hosting online lectures and courses since they can see who is really showing up for class and not sneaking out in the middle. In general, this is one of the few apps that offer such functionality.
Get Teams Customized for Your Needs
Since every company is unique and has its own internal processes. It would be great if you could customize Teams to fit individual workflows. This will increase your ROI and boost the efficiency of your employees even more. You can customize everything from themes, read receipts, and even add new apps to Teams. While Team comes jam-packed with features off-the-shelf, you will be amazed at the improved levels of efficiency such customization can bring. In order to make sure that everything is set up right in accordance with your exact specifications, it would be a good idea to hire a dedicated Microsoft Teams developers that have extensive experience in customizing all kinds of Microsoft products and Teams in particular.