Microsoft Teams came to light in early 2017 to improve team communication and collaboration.

At first this tool was born to meet the requirements of corporate clients. During these years more functions have been added, simplified processes and easier work for different types of organizations.

Teams adapts to the work it develops whether it’s a large company, a start-up, a grouping or a social organization.

Here are some ideas I’ve put together during this time when I’ve used Teams.

More than Skype for Office

Many claim that Teams is like Skype for Office.

That’s a mistake. Teams is an application with more functionalities aimed at coordinating teamwork. Its main advantage is that it integrates several Office applications, mainly incentivized the use of shared files: OneDrive for Business, Sharepoint, and Outlook, for example.

Teams retrieves outlook calendar information and also files hosted in shared folders that are hosted on OneDrive.

During video calls you can write the meeting notes and also use the built-in chat.

Calling by voice and video is just as simple as using voice calls on Whatsapp.

These same features are in the Desktop and Mobile Teams version:

Five Teams features

• Text, audio and video chat. File sharing.
• Share screen, project files into group presentations.
• Private chat.
• Store files and documents in a single place where all members of the group or project access.
• It can be integrated with other applications like Planner, Onedrive, To-do. Also third-party applications: Trello, Surveymonkey.

Teams and channels

Teams and channels in Teams are the thinnest breakdown of workgroups.

The team is a group of people who have a common goal. They can be people in your workspace, or a group by city, a specific topic, or organization.

As the channels exist within the teams and can be created at their discretion, depending on the projects they carry out or the specific topics of a particular task or a specific meeting.

Each channel has a space enabled to coordinate meetings, publish files, and attach annotations.

Searching is easy

The search bar and commands are located at the top and has several capabilities that speed up the management of information that exists in Teams.

The bar allows you to filter messages, people, and documents that exist in your groups and channels.

While commands are a little-known feature that streamlines multiple actions in Teams: how to send messages, search for files, and learn what’s new in groups.

Here are some tips I’ve been able to get to know and implement during these weeks of working with Teams.

Teams is part of the applications offered by the Microsoft 365 subscription, formerly known as Office 365. Here are the alternatives to accessing the subscription of this service that allows you to have Office applications, a terabyte of OneDrive storage, and minutes of free calls to phones and mobiles around the world via Skype.