Top 5 Collaboration Features in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform complete with document sharing, online meetings, group chats, and many more extremely useful features for business communications.

As part of the Microsoft 365 subscription, it’s the most popular business application with a staggering 91% of the Fortune 100 companies using it, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an integral part of a company’s ability to share information and communicate between employees.

Business was heading to the Cloud anyway, but the pandemic has really pushed the timeframe forward. With the people working from home during lockdown, a company’s workforce was spread across the country, sometimes even the world.

The modern workplace requires an efficient way of collaborative working in the Cloud, giving everyone real-time access to systems, clients, and each other. This multi-layered collaboration makes staff more productive, saves a company time, and helps save money in the long term.

With so much to offer the modern workplace, it’s no surprise companies are migrating to Microsoft 365, and in particular Microsoft Teams. With that in main, here are the top five collaboration features in Microsoft Teams.

As the name suggests, you can create teams in Microsoft Teams!

These teams can be different departments within an organization or simply a group of people with something in common.

For example, you can have your entire marketing department as a team, allowing them all to communicate with each other under one umbrella without having to bring in the rest of the company. Or if each department has an appointed first aider, then they can all be in the same team, communicating and sharing information across the company.

Within those teams, there are channels.

Channels allow for communication between teammates, but each channel is dedicated to a specific topic or project. This keeps conversations between sub-teams or tasks focused on one topic and stops information from getting lost within an endless chat at the team level.

So within the marketing team, you might have a channel for social media, one for press releases and one for logo design for example.

Channels help streamline work, giving everyone a clear layout of what’s needed and when. Getting information to the right people at the right time helps avoid unnecessary duplication, and includes only those who need to be in the loop. Access to certain channels can be restricted too, so only those with the correct permissions can see what’s happening.

Whatever you do in Teams, Chat is at the center of it all.

Whether it’s one-on-one conversations or group meetings, Chat has you covered.

As well as typing, users can send GIFs, stickers, emojis, and standard texts. You can even add interactive functionality to a chat, with polls, file sharing and reacts to messages.

While instant messaging may seem fleeting or reactionary, the information is securely stored for future reference too. Chat History is recorded, handy for recalling what was said or agreed on a while back, but also for helping new team members catch up.

All conversations are searchable, you can filter results, and even save messages for future reference.

And if you’re in a Group Chat that’s distracting you while you work, you can always mute it so you stop receiving notifications.

Sometimes things are a bit too complicated for a chat, and that’s when video conferencing comes in handy.

With Teams, you can video chat with anyone in your organization or host a conference call with a group.

But it’s not just for fellow employees; you can start a video call with anyone at any time, even if they’re not on Microsoft Teams.

Video conferences also allow you to share files and documents with people, as well as make notes, book calendar appointments, and record meetings.

Microsoft’s video conferencing software is also integrated seamlessly with an entire suite of productivity apps providing additional timesaving, workflow, and ease-of-use benefits.

Teams Live Events takes video calls to the next level.

With Live Events, you can broadcast video and meeting content to large online audiences, basically holding your own conference for thousands of people. Events can be public or invite-only, and can have several roles and responsibilities assigned.

The organizer, for example, schedules a live event and ensures it is set up with the right permissions for attendees and the event group, who will manage the event.

The producer acts as a host, making sure attendees have a great viewing experience by controlling the live event stream, while the presenter handles the audio, video, or moderates Q&A.

Guests log in and watch, and it’s not like your normal work meetings - people can’t interrupt the presenter by coughing!

These events can include things like large meetings, company-wide events, webinars, pitches or training videos.

Live events can share content from your desktop or webcam, and for high-profile events, you can even connect to professional cameras and multiple content sources.

One of the great things about Microsoft Teams is that anyone can use it. You don’t have to be a subscriber of Microsoft 365 to connect.

Microsoft Teams gives secure guest access to anyone with an email account so you can connect with people outside of your organization.

This is handy when you’re collaborating with someone from another company or courting new or potential clients.

And, of course, it’s all cloud hosted, giving you the freedom you won’t necessarily find elsewhere.

If you would like to make the switch to Microsoft 365, then you’ll need to migrate all your data over first.

That’s where we can help.

Talk to us about migrating your emails, files and archives, safe and securely. We have performed over 68 million migrations across 107 countries worldwide, with a 99.8% success rate.

Our award-winning migration tool is fast, secure, and easy to use, or if you’d rather simply do without the hassle, let us do everything for you with a Serviced Migration.

If you’re thinking about migrating from a physical server to the Cloud, check out our free eBook explaining everything you need to know, and how moving to the cloud can save you millions (literally).

Contact us today for a friendly chat if you would like to know more about Microsoft Teams or other Cloud Migrations.

This post has a twin! Now you’ve read the top 5 collaborations features in Microsoft Teams, check out the Top 5 Collaboration Features in Google Workspace.