Microsoft Teams for Effective Communication and Collaboration

Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication and video conferencing platform developed by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft 365 product family.

Microsoft announced Teams at an event in New York and launched the service worldwide on March 14, 2017. It was created during an internal hackathon at the company’s headquarters and is currently led by Microsoft Vice President Brian MacDonald.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams and other software such as Zoom and Google Meet gained significant attention as many meetings shifted to virtual environments, particularly for video conferencing. In 2022, it had about 270 million monthly users. This tool is among those that enable sales enablement.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based team collaboration software that is part of the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suite. The main features of Microsoft Teams include business messaging, calls, video conferences, and file sharing. Companies of all sizes can use Teams.

Teams is Microsoft’s cloud-based unified communications (UC) offering, competing with similar products like Slack, Cisco Webex, and Google Workspace. As a business communication app, Teams allows both local and remote workers to collaborate on content in real time or near real time across various devices, including laptops and mobile devices. Microsoft Teams integrates with other Microsoft business apps, including Exchange, PowerPoint, and SharePoint.

Microsoft Teams is especially useful for remote collaboration, enabling dispersed teams to stay connected and communicate. The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations worldwide to widely adopt Microsoft Teams—and other collaboration software—as a remote work communication platform.

Microsoft Teams is typically deployed organization-wide, not just within certain departments. In some cases, Teams could replace email for internal company communication among employees.

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Why should your business use Microsoft Teams?

Ultimately, businesses should use Microsoft Teams because it is extremely user-friendly and can facilitate a collaborative environment for remote users or within large enterprises. Projects, productions, and other business elements can benefit from Microsoft Teams.

For companies using Skype for Business, the Microsoft Teams client will replace the Skype client, but all existing additional features will remain the same.

Microsoft Teams: All These Extraordinary Features

Microsoft Teams is a persistent chat-based collaboration platform with document sharing, online meetings, and many other extremely useful features for business communications.

Having a great team space is essential for making creative decisions and communicating with each other. Shared workspace software makes this much easier, especially if a particular team is based in a very large company, has many remote employees, or consists of a large number of team members.

Microsoft Teams’ features set it apart from fragmented collaboration software:

• Teams and channels. Teams are made up of channels, which are conversation forums between teammates.
• Conversations across channels and teams. All team members can view and add to various conversations in the general channel. You can also use @functions to invite others to conversations, similar to Slack.
• Chat feature. The basic chat feature is usually found in most collaboration apps and can be used between teams, groups, and individuals.
• Document storage in SharePoint. Each team using Microsoft Teams has a site in SharePoint Online with default document library folders. All files shared in conversations are automatically saved here. Permissions and security options can be customized for sensitive information.
• Online video calls and screen sharing. Enjoy smooth, fast video calls with internal employees and external clients. Good video call capabilities are essential in your collaboration platform. You can also benefit from simple, fast desktop sharing for real-time tech support and multi-user collaboration.
• Online meetings. This feature enhances communication, company-wide meetings, and even training with online meeting capabilities for up to 10,000 users. Anyone inside or outside the company can join online meetings. This feature also includes scheduling assistance, a notes app, file uploads, and in-meeting chat messages. Audioconferencing is also available—a feature not found in many collaboration platforms.
• Audioconferencing allows anyone to join an online meeting by phone. With access numbers covering hundreds of cities, you can connect even on the go without Internet. Note that this requires an additional license. Full telephony.
• Complete telephony. That’s right! The days of searching for a VoIP provider and spending millions on a phone system are over. Microsoft 365 Business Voice can fully replace your company’s existing phone system. Note that this requires an additional license.

Using Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is incredibly simple and easy to use. Little to no setup is required. That said, before deploying a platform company-wide, you should consider how your business intends to use it.

There are two main options to consider:

• Organic approach. A company may choose to deploy Microsoft Teams immediately as a "free-for-all," where everyone can use the platform as they wish and its adoption and use evolve spontaneously.

• Managed approach. This more controlled approach requires using Microsoft Teams for certain aspects of your business. It also includes strict control over who can use it and who can perform certain actions, creating a phased deployment plan across the organization.

You can choose something involving both approaches or something in between. What suits a particular business depends on its culture and use cases. Teams can be managed and configured directly from the Teams admin center.

From a user perspective, Teams is very intuitive and the learning curve is quite low compared to more complicated collaboration tools.

We can provide customized training for your team members if needed, but we also have excellent online training materials for Microsoft users. These materials are presented as a series of very short videos showing how to do different things and perform various functions in Microsoft Teams. Easily share documents with multiple or all Microsoft Teams members, making custom training materials and business policies available on a single platform for new users and collaborators.

Teams is a powerful and extremely useful collaboration environment that is gaining popularity. Microsoft Teams is included free with Office 365, so every Office user can get the most out of this collaboration solution. Simplify teamwork by collaborating, sharing, and communicating—all on one platform.