Most organisations and employees are familiar with common Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook and Exchange for email, calendars and tasks; and Word, PowerPoint and Excel for creating documents, presentations and spreadsheets.
More recently, Microsoft Teams has become popular as a tool for virtual and hybrid working. Many organisations use Microsoft Teams to help their people stay connected through scheduled and ad-hoc virtual meetings, chats and messaging – and phone calls, too, if enabled by the organisation. In addition to regular meetings, other meeting formats like webinars and live events can be set up. A meeting can involve just two people, or can bring together up to 1,000 participants.
Did you know that Microsoft Teams is your front door to all your other
Microsoft 365 apps like Lists, Planner, Power Automate and more – and to Microsoft AppSource, where you can find apps and add-ins developed by trusted second parties?
How Microsoft Teams works
Microsoft Teams isn't just a great way to hold online meetings. Here are three ways teams can use it to do more with less:
1. Document editing by several people at the same time
You can
collaborate on and co-author documents in real time using Microsoft apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and many others – doing away with the need to switch to another app or share documents by email. And because everyone works on the same version of a document, you know there's a single source of truth. No out-of-sync duplicates, no version control issues. And a full audit trail of edits and comments, so you always know who changed what and when.
A document library is automatically set up on SharePoint as soon as a new team is created in Microsoft Teams. Only team members can directly access the files stored there, but they can of course share them with other people at any time.
2. Project management and task allocation
You can use Planner within Microsoft Teams to plan tasks and
handle small projects – efficiently organising and assigning tasks to team members and setting deadlines. For individual projects, by the way, you can also set up dynamic, time-limited teams to enable efficient collaboration for the duration of the project.
3. Shared digital notebook
A team can add the digital notebook via the tabs in the respective Teams channel and then all team members have shared access to it to organise their work and manage projects, campaigns and other activities, such as setting meeting agenda and writing minutes.
As well as keeping notes, you can:
- Paste in content from elsewhere, including images and audio and video clips
- Categorise information using tags
- Create separate sections for different projects, channels and team meetings
Learn more about working in Microsoft Teams and how it helps teams do more with less. Download our free eBook
here.
