Welcome to the first part in a mini series about Microsoft Teams within Office 365. Today, we’re breaking down two of the most useful tools available through Microsoft Teams, and why your business should start using them.
Transcript:
“Hi, everyone. Lee from Everything Tech here. This week, I’m going to start a multi-part miniseries about using Microsoft Teams. If you’ve not heard of Microsoft Teams before, it’s Microsoft’s fastest-growing business product ever in their history, which is a pretty bold statement considering this is the company that launched Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint several years ago. Teams is a collaboration, communication, telephony, and documents storage platform. So, the idea is that WhatsApp, Skype for Business, SharePoint and your telephony platform all come under one place and become Microsoft Teams. And it’s designed to keep you in a single pane of glass so that you can do everything that your daily task requires in a single application. There’s tons of features in Microsoft Teams, and I’m going to start by showing you two of the most basic ones, and that’s instant messaging and group chat.
“So, when I’m talking to customers about Microsoft Teams, I always start these conversations by saying to them, “If you were having a conversation with a friend or a family member at 8:00 o’clock on a Monday night when you’re watching ‘Coronation Street,’ you wouldn’t dream of sending them an email. It would just be completely unnatural.” With apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and those kind of things, they’re so much more natural and conversation-like, because you can type a short message and you can see that the other person’s replying, and it’s so much more like a normal conversation.
“The business world has really fallen behind the consumer world, in terms of conversation and collaboration digitally, because predominantly, most businesses that I go to are still using email to communicate. And emails are really a slow and cumbersome tool for rapid communication. You send an email, but people are spending more time trying to get on with their job than answering emails. And so, it can take hours and sometimes even days for people to get back to you using email, whereas with instant messaging, it’s a much quicker conversation. You can get the information that you need much faster.
“So there’s two other tools: the first one is chatting between yourselves, chatting between two people or a group of people. And here you can see, you can start an instant messaging in Microsoft Teams, quickly adding other people into the conversation. You could do things like ‘@’ mentions to mention a specific person. So if you use the ‘@’ key on your keyboard, that alerts that person and the instant messaging conversation goes red for them, so that they know that somebody’s talking directly to them. It really speeds up the information gathering and information sharing in your business.
“The second thing here is Teams, you know, that’s what the whole product is built upon. So, a Team can be a group of people that are working together on a certain project, or it can be a group of people that are working on a specific task. And you can create Teams and remove Teams at your will. It means that everybody that’s worked on that project is always kept up to date. So, unlike Skype for Business, when you type a message in Teams and people aren’t there to see it, the thread of the message (the whole conversation) is kept so that people can catch up later. And there’s some nice features, like you can do GIFs and you can do images. So, the instant messaging and Teams chat feature of Microsoft Teams is revolutionary for your business.
“If you’ve been communicating via email for all this time, I’d definitely recommend that you get on it and speak to me. Give me a call if you’d like to know more about it. I’m going be covering some of the more advanced features over the next few days and weeks. But these two features are probably the two most fundamental ones for the product.”
