What is Microsoft Teams and why should I use it?

Most people think of Microsoft Teams as a video conferencing app, kind of like BlueJeans or Zoom, which it is, however... there is more to it than that. A lot more!!!

Teams is a tool that is designed to help teams collaborate. Not just communicate, but COLLABORATE.

In retrospect, BlueJeans has been a great tool over the years that helped us communicate with video and audio, but any collaboration was done with other tools. Some of those tools were the network file shares, applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., and of course email.

The Teams tool allows you to create virtual teams which can consist of, not only Christman employees, but external partners / guests. Sure... you can schedule meetings where you can talk, share your screen, whiteboard, and breakout into smaller groups; but you can also use Teams to collaborate on files, drawings, photos, videos, web-links, etc. Using the Microsoft Office suite of applications, a group of you can collaborate on a file all at the same time. You can edit and you can have multiple other people edit simultaneously. You can have a group chat on a file. You can have group discussions in Team Channels, take polls, or start an instant meeting or just a screen share without a meeting. Your Team can become the hub of all your work. You can add optional channel tabs that can be for notes, a calendar, a sign-up sheet, or just a list of web links that are helpful for the team to access.

Maybe you don't even need a full fledged team. You can create a chat on your own (on the fly) with any employees or guests and those Chats can have files and tabs also for collaboration. You can instantly fire-up a meeting or a screen share. Think of them as "Mini Teams" that you can use once, or use over and over again for months.

You will want to use Teams for easy team communication (audio/video/screen sharing) and for collaboration on files or anything you can think of. Using a team can help you cut down on email overload. Instead of emailing about a certain project you are working on, team members can keep the conversation within the Team's Posts area - all nice and neat!

With calendar integration, any scheduled team meetings automatically get added to your calendar. And if you are setup as a Team Owner, you can add and remove team members yourself, add and remove Channels, and Tabs also. You can have almost complete control without IT's help.

Here are a few examples of why you may want to have a Team setup.

You simply need an easy way to share files back and forth with a design firm. For something like this you could even create your own Chat - but if it is a partner you will be working with a lot, then a Team (or possibly a Channel under an existing Team) can be created to make it easy to share files back and forth.
You are working on a pursuit with a lot of team members both internal and external. Perhaps the pursuit is somewhat confidential. A private Team and/or Channel can be created for communication and collaboration just for team members.
You are creating training material that you need to share with a large team and have good communication on the content. You don't want to clutter up your email with this project communication. You need to be able to "multi-edit" a file with multiple people at a time.

But wait, there's more...

The file repository behind Teams is SharePoint. If you don't know what SharePoint is, don't worry, but just know it is a super powerful file storage system. If Teams can't do something, we can "bop out" into SharePoint and setup more granular security permissions, or even setup emails alerts if you want to know when someone drops a file in a folder or even makes an edit.

But wait, there is even more...

Using Microsoft's OneDrive for Business, you can have a copy any Team's files replicated onto your PC's hard drive for easy access using Windows File Explorer just like you've done for years!

Keep exploring these help documents for more information and look for video training.