Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool that is part of the Office 365 suite of services. Teams enables remote, global and dispersed teams to work together and collaborate through a common workspace, team chat, one-on-one chat, document collaboration and more. Teams is integrated with a variety of other Office 365 services, including OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, Exchange, and SharePoint.

It brings your team’s conversations, meetings, storage, files, application integration and notes together into a single place for open and seamless collaboration.

Learn more in the video What is Microsoft Teams?

What can I do with Teams?

Teams makes communicating one-on-one and with groups a snap. Teams is built on top of Office 365 Groups in Rutgers Connect and provides group members with an option for real-time collaboration using a chat-based workspace. Chats are kept for easy searching and the experience is customizable so that you can follow the discussion channels that interest you and hide those that do not. Teams will allow you to be more agile and spontaneous in your communication, including impromptu meetings with your group members, whereas groups are used more for occasional communication through conversations.

It’s also a great resource for accessing your group’s files and communications in one place. Instead of navigating from your group’s mailbox to it’s OneDrive, then to the group’s OneNote and SharePoint site, you can view it all in a single location. Teams allows you to integrate a variety of Office 365 applications that you or your group may use, while making it easier to open a discussion or reference files.

How do I transition to Teams?

With Teams, you can do more real-time collaboration such as editing a document with all of your group members at the same time. You also get chat, forum, and email archive in a more streamlined interface using the chat-based discussion channels. You can instantly meet within Teams with one or more members of your group. If you have a site with files that you’d like to migrate, OneDrive offers unlimited storage for groups.

Consider switching to using Teams for your weekly status meetings or to improve your hiring process when getting feedback on candidates.