What is Microsoft Teams and When to Use It?

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About this lesson

Why did Microsoft build Teams? Email is great for many types of communications but when teams collaborate on projects, other features are very helpful. Teams incorporates features like teams chat, online meetings, and document sharing to provide a collaboration service for company projects, departments, or even for social purposes.

 

Quick reference

What is Microsoft Teams and When to Use It?

Microsoft Teams is designed as a collaboration service. It arose out of the widespread recognition that e-mail, while very useful, is too limited to support close collaboration.  When using email, you have to search your mailbox to find a thread and not all people on team may be included in all the conversations. This results in fragmented communications. A better solution is to have persistent chat available for any team member to view at any time.  Also, document collaboration and team meetings are not easily managed via email.

When to use

Use Teams to support parts of the organization such as departments, business units, or projects such as working on a new product release or marketing campaign. You can also invite people outside of your organization to participate in a Team to help augment your project. 

Instructions

The main body of information related to Teams is hosted on the Microsoft site.

1. Do a Google search for "Microsoft Teams" and look at the first page of listings.

2. Browse to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software and review the content.

3. Examine https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/compare-microsoft-teams-options and explore the differences.

Hints & tips

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  • 00:04 In this lesson, we'll talk about what is Microsoft Teams and
  • 00:07 when should you use it?
  • 00:09 Microsoft Teams is a part of Microsoft 365, which is also called Office 365.
  • 00:14 Teams is included with most of the subscriptions
  • 00:18 that include the online services.
  • 00:20 Now, you'll notice I said most of the subscriptions,
  • 00:22 let me show you what I mean.
  • 00:24 If we take a look at Google and we type in Microsoft 365,
  • 00:29 you'll see that the first entry is the official Microsoft 365 site.
  • 00:34 When you click on this, you'll see the Home,
  • 00:37 Business, and Enterprise offerings for Microsoft 365.
  • 00:42 The for business entries are for small businesses of 300 or fewer people.
  • 00:48 You'll see the Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium.
  • 00:53 If you scroll to the bottom,
  • 00:55 you'll see the various services that are offered with the services.
  • 00:59 All of them include Microsoft Teams,
  • 01:01 except on the right which is the Microsoft 365 Apps for Business.
  • 01:05 Now, this is actually a subscription service for
  • 01:08 Microsoft Office that you install on your computer.
  • 01:11 It only includes the OneDrive service.
  • 01:14 So as you can see, most of the Microsoft 365 services do include Teams.
  • 01:19 If you ever wonder, you can just look for the Teams logo
  • 01:22 to see if it's included in the subscription that you're interested in.
  • 01:27 Teams was created to be a significant improvement over using email alone for
  • 01:31 highly collaborative projects and environments.
  • 01:34 Built into Teams is file sharing, chat, voice and video calls,
  • 01:38 as well as many other features.
  • 01:41 Frequently, you'll see Teams used to support departments within a company,
  • 01:44 like HR or marketing or research, for example.
  • 01:49 In addition, you'll find Teams for specific projects,
  • 01:52 maybe you've got a release of a new product or a marketing campaign.
  • 01:55 Teams is great for supporting those efforts.
  • 01:57 If you have events to coordinate, those can have lots of moving parts.
  • 02:01 It's a great use case for Teams.
  • 02:03 Also, you'll even find Teams in use for social reasons,
  • 02:06 like Tuesday game nights or, what are people binge watching?
  • 02:10 Teams also makes it easy to schedule and host online team meetings.
  • 02:14 Right within the Teams' UI, you can invite everyone on your team and anyone else you
  • 02:18 care to have to a Team meeting, which is then announced to everyone automatically.
  • 02:22 Team members can also be outside of your company.
  • 02:26 This makes it a great resource for
  • 02:28 inviting experts or other resources that you may need to augment a team
  • 02:32 to participate as full team members even if they aren't part of your organization.
  • 02:38 In this introduction to Teams, we've talked about what Microsoft Teams is and
  • 02:42 when you should use it.
  • 02:44 We've covered how Microsoft Teams is a part of Microsoft 365, and
  • 02:47 it's included with most of the service subscriptions, and how it can be used to
  • 02:51 help teams collaborate as a significant improvement over email.
  • 02:55 Also, and importantly,
  • 02:57 you can invite people outside your company to participate as full team members.

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