Microsoft Teams brings together some of the best components of Office 365 in a single tool. One of its biggest goals is collaboration. You are most likely going to benefit from using Teams within a department, group, team, or project. A new Team -- or new channels within a Team -- can be made for new goals in mind. We’ve listed below some of the most common use cases for Microsoft Teams.
Managing, administering, and collaborating within a department or unit can be made easy through Teams. You can track discussions in message threads across various channels, schedule meetings or training sessions in the team’s calendar, organize files in the team’s OneDrive component, and more, all in one place. Restrictions can be implemented and configured by a team’s owner that can be beneficial for submitting documents, viewing private files, or chatting in private spaces.
Teams allows you to host remote virtual meetings within your team, or between users individually. You can screen share, join conference calls, or hold a video conference for team members to join. They can be scheduled ahead of time or made on the spot. A great thing about Teams meetings is that they can be recorded and saved to Microsoft Stream as an option for others to view later or reference. This can be used for orientations, training sessions, interviews, and more.
Individual or group work efforts are made easier with Teams. Students can make their own Teams with either their ScarletMail or Connect accounts. External users can also be added to these self-created Teams. Creating a Team provides students with the ability to virtually meet and work with group members, store all files/documents related to a project in one space, work together on updating a document, mark due dates on calendars, and more.
Teams can act as a repository for research-related activities. Each Team has its own files component with unlimited HIPAA compliant storage and an associated email address. Sharing and reviewing research files is made convenient -- you can email the group a document that can be viewed (and saved) in the Team space. You can reference files in a discussion thread within Teams while editing the files in real-time. External collaborators can also be included or restricted to certain files, channels, and discussions.
If a department has a number of projects that need managing, Microsoft Teams is a great tool for the job. Whether your project relates software development, lab work, hiring, promotion tracking, or committee organization, having a number of Office 365 products in one space can help make tasks run smoothly. With Sharepoint, OneDrive, OneNote, Flow, and other integrations at your disposal, you can work on and manage your projects in a simple and easy application that has everything in one place.