Microsoft Teams: Improving an already good Collaboration tool

Microsoft Teams: Improving an already good Collaboration tool

It’s been close to 10 months since Microsoft has introduced Teams in an effort to help their customers improve their collaboration within the workspace.  Through these months, Microsoft has been slowly improving Teams through their observations and user feedback.  One example of this was the integration of third party applications such as Trello and SurveyMonkey.  Even now they are still updating Teams, recently they have released a new update in which they have integrated exciting new features which will surely help your company’s collaboration efforts!

New ways to utilize your apps in Teams

Include information from an app in a conversation

Be able to discuss content from a different app directly in Teams with the latest update.  Just like putting an emoji or GIF in the chat, you’ll be able to search and post integrated app information into chat and channels.  Be able search for a specific task in Trello, a work item in Wrike, or even a weather forcast, and even integrate them it into an interactive card.

Access a personal view of your apps

With the update, you can now easily access apps you frequently use and even see all items on those apps such as tasks in planner, issues in Jira Cloud and even conveniently find items you recently used such notebooks from OneNote.  This is made possible due to the addition of the personal apps space.  In addition, you can also find a new app in this space called Who, a new app powered by Microsoft Graph, which enables you to search for people in your organization by name or topic.

Find apps for Teams in the new Store

To make discovering and finding apps simpler in Teams by allowing users to search for apps by name, category, and integration type (like bots, tabs, connectors) in their new store.

Command apps, take quick actions, and search—all from the command box

Command apps from the command box

In the latest patch, Microsoft has added the function to query or command an app from the command box.   You are now able to search information in an app and easily place the results into a chat or channel in Teams.  More functions will be added overtime, one function they are working on is to create a task in your project management app over the Teams command box.

Take quick actions with slash commands

A convenient new function added to Teams would be the addition of slash commands to help you execute shortcuts quickly.


Contact us at 893-9515 to learn more about Microsoft Teams and how it can help you collaborate better with your own Team!

Microsoft Teams Now Available in Office 365

Microsoft Teams Now Available in Office 365

On March 14, 2017, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Teams, its collaboration app as its answer to Slack, would now be available in their productivity suite, Office 365.  Being available in 181 markets and in 19 different languages, Microsoft Teams is already being adopted in major companies such as Accenture, Alaska Airlines and Walter Thompson in their operations.

With over 85 million active users, Office 365 empowers the individual or the groups in your organization with its broad set of tools for collaboration.  Designed to meet the unique workstyle of every group in different organizations — Outlook for its enterprise-grade email; SharePoint for intelligent content management; Yammer for networking across the organization; Skype for Business as the backbone for enterprise voice and video; and now, Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365.


Chat for today’s teams

Providing modern conversation experience, Microsoft Teams will keep everyone engaged with its threaded and persistent chat.  New communication features such as audio calling from mobile devices and video call on android, soon to be released on iOS and Windows phones as well, were added to improve on collaboration.  Microsoft Teams has also added the ability to email a channel, include attachments, send messages with markdown-based formatting and receive notifications about all posts in a channel.


Hub for Teamwork

With Office 365, applications and services such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint are readily provided to Microsoft Teams users to be sure that they will have the tools and information needed to collaborate better.  To improve user experience, Microsoft Teams has recently added support for open, public teams within your organization and enhanced user meeting experience by adding scheduling capabilities, integrating calendar availability(free/busy) and more.


Customizable for every team

Knowing every team is unique, Microsoft Teams has made it easy to customize your workspace with Tabs, Connectors and Bots.  With over 150 integrations available and more coming soon such as bots from hipmunk, SAP SuccessFactors to help employees and managers track goals and performance and Trello to help empower teams to easily get projects done with boards, lists and cards.

 

To learn more about Microsoft Teams and Office 365, contact us at 893 9515.