If you are new to Microsoft Teams and are looking for help, you have come to the right place. Let’s first talk a little about what Teams is and what is all buzz about. Microsoft created Teams as part of its wildly popular Office 365 suite of business programs. It is primarily a communications tool, but it is also so much more.
It is designed to link people together in order to collaborate on projects. It allows remote meetings to be scheduled, screens to be shared, and files to be stored and shared. Since it is part of the Office 365 platform, it can be used in conjunction with all of the Microsoft productivity programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
In the four short years since Microsoft first released Microsoft Teams, the number of daily users has ballooned to more than 140 million users. As businesses had to figure out how to get the most productivity out of their workers under some of the most difficult circumstances.
For this blog post, we have decided to come up with some very effective tips that anyone can follow in order to get the most out of Microsoft Teams.
Don’t use duplicate team names
Naming your teams is very important to keep things focused. However, you want to avoid using duplicate names. The easiest way to make things overly confusing for your people is to make the mistake of duplicating names. Try to be unique as possible without being too complex either.
Only use a specific naming method
To make it much easier for you to name the groups and projects and make it less confusing to your people, follow a specific naming convention or methodology. It will allow your employees to better understand how to be able to search for the specific information that pertains to their tasks.
Be sure to choose the correct options
One thing you will notice about Teams is that is divided into two sections Chat and Teams. You can use this to your advantage by training your people to use the chat for one-on-one messaging and using the Teams for group discussions and collaborations. This will help keep it better organised for your organisation
Make good use of private groups
When you are first introducing Teams to your organisation you should always make the most important groups private. This will help to keep things more focused for them. That way only things pertaining to their specific tasks and projects will be accessible to them. It will make training them on how to best use Teams a lot easier for them and for you.
Set up a specific team for all projects
It is important to be sure that you have unique team names for each of the specific projects that are being created. This will help you to be sure that all files are kept organised with the specific project even if your employees work on multiple projects at the same time. This also will make it easier to search for all of the files and data associated with each project.
Be sure to discuss file and folder-sharing features
File-sharing is a very big part of what makes Microsoft Teams such a powerful collaboration tool. However, unless you make all of your employees familiar with how file sharing works, they may not see the benefits. Teams use Microsoft Sharepoint to handle all of the storage of the data files. This means you will need to train your staff on how to access the folders and files that are created by other team members.
Use notifications wisely
Notifications are quite valuable, however, if your organisation is large, you just might be overwhelmed with all of the notifications coming into your console. Fortunately, the console has a way for you to change how you receive notifications. If you go into Settings in the console you can pick and choose which notifications you receive and you can also get emails with summaries of the notifications at different intervals.
Be sure to schedule meetings on the built-in calendar
While Microsoft Outlook is a powerful scheduling tool, however, Teams has Meeting integrated inside the platform. Microsoft Meeting is a much more effective way to handle all of your collaborative meetings. You can easily schedule all your meetings and create notifications all within the Team platform. You can also set up an instant meeting if the need arises.
Use Notes whenever possible
Microsoft Notes is the perfect companion software to go along with Teams. You can use it to take and share notes from meetings or other collaboration projects. The notes can be taken and put into folders within notebooks. The notebooks can be used to hold other files such as multimedia-type files and everyone in the group can access the folders and files.
Use the background feature for your video calls
Chances are not many people will have the perfect office setting for a video call. So, to help with that Teams comes with an instant background that you can select from a wide range of unique background settings. While setting up the Teams you can select the background that you want to be used. By clicking on the three dots on the screen before entering the meeting, you can choose what background option.
Contact us at www.norfolkcs.co.uk or 01953 857980 for a free audit and friendly discussion on how we can help.