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About this lesson

In this lesson, we'll install the Teams client and take a tour of the Teams interface and capabilities.

Quick reference

Exploring Teams

Exploring the Teams interface is a great way to get started learning to use Teams. 

When to use

Use this guide when you're just getting familiar with the Teams interface and are looking for tips on what to explore.

Instructions

Main areas of the UI include:

  • The left sidebar - icons are shown for each main function in teams. Click on each of them and see how what they look like. In your fresh installation, you won't see much content, but you should get a sense of what each of these areas does so that you are familiar with how to get started.
  • When Teams is selected, you will see the Teams in your company, which at this stage will be just one, and channels underneath. Channels are where the main activity in Teams occurs. 
  • All conversations posted in Teams is available for everyone to see. In this way, you can catch up on important conversations when you check in.
  • To have a private conversation, click Chat, and type in the name of someone in the company. At this point, there is only one user, but we will add someone to the trial account in a later lesson that can be used to interact with in the Teams UI.
  • Click on the Files tab to see the files shared by Team members. Feel free to drag and top a file to the UI to upload a file. 
  • The Calendar function allows you to create Team meetings. By default, you won't see any there, but take a look at options available when you click on New Meeting.
  • Check your online status by clicking on the user icon in the upper right corner.

Hints & tips

  • Hovering over most items in the UI pops up a tooltip that can explain what you're looking at.
  • Many useful features are shown when you click on the ellipses (...)
  • Take a look at the options available when you click + on the tabs menu. Think of ways to add tabs to your teams site that could be useful. Most benefit from a OneNote or Planner section.
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  • 00:04 In this lesson, we'll explore Teams so you can get to know the app and
  • 00:08 learn how things work.
  • 00:09 Let's start with launching Teams from the desktop by clicking on the Team's icon,
  • 00:14 then login with your username and password.
  • 00:17 Before we begin, please note that online services such as Microsoft 365,
  • 00:21 and Teams are constantly improving.
  • 00:23 As a result, what we show here may be different in some ways than what you see.
  • 00:28 This class will be refreshed periodically, but even so,
  • 00:31 don't be surprised to find a few differences.
  • 00:33 What you're looking at is a fresh Team's installation, which can look a little bear
  • 00:37 for a Team site because after all, there are no teams yet.
  • 00:40 Let's take a look at what a more active Teams installation looks like and
  • 00:45 you can still follow along.
  • 00:46 So this is the Team's UI in a setup where there's a little more activity.
  • 00:51 You can see that Teams is selected on the left bar,
  • 00:55 where there are various Teams features including Activity,
  • 00:59 Chat, Teams, Calendar, Calls, Files, and the mysterious ....
  • 01:05 If you click on the ..., more things come up depending on where you are.
  • 01:09 You'll notice they're kind of all over the place in the UI.
  • 01:12 You can see that we have Teams listed here showing that we have Teams selected.
  • 01:17 And in this case Contoso, Business Development and
  • 01:21 the X1050 Launch are the Teams.
  • 01:23 Within the Teams are the subcategories, these are known as channels.
  • 01:28 Now channels are very important concept in Teams because this is where all
  • 01:31 the work happens.
  • 01:32 So let's say I'm in the Pipeline team for Biz Dev, and so
  • 01:35 the sales people are talking about who potential opportunities are,
  • 01:39 they would have that conversation here.
  • 01:41 And so, hey, I got a new lead.
  • 01:48 And that goes into the activities,
  • 01:51 which everyone can see the activity feed here for the Posts.
  • 01:55 Now at the top here, here are what we call tabs.
  • 01:59 These Posts are the various activities and conversations that go on,
  • 02:03 including either file shares or Team meetings can be posted here.
  • 02:07 And in fact, the files if you do share them, they wind up on this tab here.
  • 02:11 So you can see, here's a spreadsheet that is Recently Closed Deals, and
  • 02:16 if I click on this, anybody on the Team can then see the spreadsheet and
  • 02:20 potentially even edit it or make comments within the spreadsheet.
  • 02:24 Multiple people can edit the file at the same time,
  • 02:27 which is a very cool feature of Teams.
  • 02:29 You can click on these back and forward buttons to take you to a previous screen.
  • 02:36 Continuing at the tabs, there's a Wiki which is installed by default.
  • 02:40 And then also there is the, Add a tab feature which is very cool and allows you
  • 02:45 to customize your Team further, to allow you to add features that can be helpful.
  • 02:51 In addition to that, there are a lot of third party add ins for Teams thus
  • 02:56 is allowing you to add even more capability than is provided by default,
  • 03:01 as a part of the service.
  • 03:03 Now you've seen how if you want to post a comment to the Team,
  • 03:06 you could just type it down here.
  • 03:08 But if you want to have a private chat with someone, you can click on this
  • 03:12 very unintuitive little pencil and a box thing called NewChat, and
  • 03:16 that will launch a screen that takes you to the chat function on the side.
  • 03:21 So it'd be the same in a way is if you click Chat option, and
  • 03:25 then you can type in the name of who you want to chat to.
  • 03:29 And this is actually very interesting set of capabilities because as you type it
  • 03:33 filters the people in your organization to show you just the people that you may be
  • 03:38 talking to or you would wish to talk to.
  • 03:40 And if you hover over one of these people, if this information is provided by your
  • 03:44 organization, you can see quite a lot of useful detail here about this individual.
  • 03:49 One of them is whether or not they are online or offline,
  • 03:52 this is known as status.
  • 03:53 So we can see here that Enrico is offline, but you in this case,
  • 03:58 I'm logged in as Megan, I am available with the little green status indicator.
  • 04:03 Now you can control whether or not you want to be seen as Available,
  • 04:07 by clicking on your little icon, and then setting the status to as you wish.
  • 04:11 Do Not disturb, can be very handy,
  • 04:13 whenever you are in the middle of an online meeting, or
  • 04:16 you simply don't want to be pinged by people, dropping in on you via chat.
  • 04:20 So let's say I did want to actually, not just type a chat but
  • 04:23 I wanted to have a phone conversation with Enrico.
  • 04:26 I can just click the phone icon here and that will launch
  • 04:31 into a voice over video phone call to try to reach Enrico.
  • 04:36 You can also do the same thing with video if this isn't it up,
  • 04:39 you can make a video call.
  • 04:41 Calendar is another great feature, you can schedule calendar events.
  • 04:45 You can schedule group meetings, team meetings, and they show up in your
  • 04:49 outlook synchronized calendar here and then also on the Teams' feed.
  • 04:53 So here you can see an event on the calendar for the Team, put on here by
  • 04:57 Meghan and all you have to do to join the meeting is click on the event and
  • 05:01 join the meeting here, here or here.
  • 05:03 So there's a lot more that you can do with Teams and we'll be covering all
  • 05:07 these details in additional lessons where we drill into each of these features.
  • 05:11 In our next lesson, we'll talk about customizing and personalizing Teams.

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