Many of us will be familiar with Yammer, Slack, and a range of other chat-based workplace platforms. Now Microsoft has joined the party with a platform of its own called Microsoft Teams.

Because Teams is part of Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium and Enterprise, it not only offers the familiar chat and channel functionality, it can also truly enable real time collaboration on documents from spreadsheets to word documents and more.

Functionality and features include:

  • Open channels for groups or projects
  • Ability for a user to easily switch between teams/channels when working on multiple projects
  • Connectors which bring in things like Twitter so that relevant tweets can be brought into the stream of posts, for example if you are tracking a topic or an event, tweets on that topic or event can be pulled in to be discussed
  • Tab functionality within a channel to quickly swap between most used apps, files, notes (incorporating One Note) and more
  • Integrated Bots – ‘Polly’ to run polls within the platform, T-Bot for help (allowing you to find answers via search or video content) and Who Bot to find out info about people in your organisation – for example “who is” the expert on a particular topic
  • Video calls integrating Skype to enable teams to brainstorm and collaborate in real time using Open Meetings, with multiple people on screen at once
  • Full mobile functionality
  • Embeddable images, gifs, files, stickers and emoji

Compared to alternatives like Slack, Microsoft Teams offers the most comprehensive workspace platform. With Office 365 integration and over 150 partner-plugin tools, Microsoft Teams takes it to another level.

If you are a business looking to collaborate using Microsoft’s suite of products, then Teams will offer the most complete solution.

Check out the live demo video below if you are interested in finding out more – then give us a call to see how you can get Teams set up as part of your 365 install.