With the software Microsoft Teams you can communicate and work together in a single secure environment. It is a popular communication platform that competes with Slack. Teams is based on chat. We can think of it as an alternative to email.

With Teams, you can do workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage and sharing, and application integration. It integrates with MS Office and many other tools such as SharePoint. With Teams, you can also send private messages. You can share your desktop. Applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Delve, and Power BI are all integrated into Teams. For example, you can create a document in Excel and save it to your OneDrive cloud storage. Then you can easily share it with others in Teams.

When you create a team in Teams, you create an Office 365 group. When you create an Office 365 group, it does not create a Team.

Wikipedia says: “Teams allow users to communicate through chats. Teams allows communities, groups, or teams to join through a specific URL or invitation sent by a team administrator or owner. Within a team, members can set up channels. Channels are topics of conversation that allow team members to communicate without the use of email or group SMS (texting). Direct messages allow users to send private messages to a specific user rather than a group of people. Ad-hoc groups can be created. Meetings can be scheduled or created ad hoc and users visiting the channel will be able to see that a meeting is currently in progress. Breakout rooms allow users to split a meeting into small groups. Front Row allows participants to adjust the layout of the meeting, putting the speaker or content in the center of the gallery with the participant video feed at the bottom. Microsoft Teams has hundreds of integrations available through Microsoft AppSource, its integration marketplace.”

With Teams, data in encrypted in transit and at rest. Teams supports all major compliance standards.

Learning Teams

If you are a beginner and you want to learn about Teams, you can watch videos on YouTube. There are lots of them. Here is one called How to Use Microsoft Teams Effectively | Your COMPLETE Guide which is 24 minutes long. It is by Leila Gharani. If you want a shorter video have a glance at one called Microsoft Teams Tutorial in 10 min by Kevin Stratvert. Another one by Kevin is called How to use Microsoft Teams and it is just over 20 minutes long.

Features

Bring your team together. Create a collaborative workspace for your team and let anybody join, or keep it private. Use channels to organize activity by topic, area, or anything else.

Chat 1:1 and with groups. Share ideas in open team conversations, or chat privately with anyone in this organization. Read files in chats and share your own files in channels.

Connect through online meetings. Join scheduled meetings, or start your own impromptu public meeting in any channel. Use video and screen sharing to bring everybody closer together.

Files, notes, apps, and more, all in one place. All your team’s tools are organized and integrated together. Get the best of Microsoft 365 and other services via custom tabs, connectors, and bots.