Tips on Using Microsoft Teams

Dennis Snider

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With hundreds of millions of workers worldwide suddenly forced to work from home during the global pandemic, videoconferencing has become the order of the day, and Microsoft Teams (free for any individual/organizations using Microsoft 365 and for any organization with under 300 employees (with some features limited)) has seen its popularity rocket as a result. In one week in March, the application was gaining 12 million new users every day.

Below are five useful tips to get the most out of Microsoft Teams, both now and in the future.

Sharing to Outlook: an update released in February means that you can now share chats or channel conversations as emails to Outlook, and you do not have to leave Teams to do it. Simply select More Options>Share to Outlook, select a recipient, make any modifications you require, and send.

Hand out nametags: to avoid filling group members’ inboxes with messages that don’t apply to them, it’s now possible to allocate specific tags to team members so that only they receive particular messages, e.g., if only half the group are concerned with shipping issues, allocate them a @shipping tag and next time you send a message in Teams you can set it to go only to them.

Vary the size of your Teams: small and medium-size businesses can use the default setting on Microsoft Teams to have a single channel covering the whole business; larger organizations can select “Build a team from scratch” and create individual teams for particular regions, departments, etc.

Sync files to desktop: using SharePoint, you can now take files from Teams and sync them directly to whatever platform you are using: you can see document previews in more than 320 types of files and select the one best suited for your device.

Record your meetings and calls: If members of a Team have access to Microsoft Stream, they can now record everything that goes on in a meeting on group call, including audio, video, and any screen sharing, a useful feature which allows participants fully to concentrate on the meeting rather than taking notes or trying to remember things later.