There are more than 800 Teams in active use here at Oxford, are you in one, or more than one, of them? Teams is one of Microsoft’s fastest growing tools. It’s easy to use and allows you to work closely with colleagues on projects and tasks, using integrated apps. It even works with other Microsoft products such as OneDrive, Planner and Forms, aiming to keep your desktop streamlined and efficient while providing all the tools you need in one place. Did you know that in Teams you can keep private items in their own channel, shared only with owners and specific Team members?
We’ve been making a list of things you can do with Teams. We’re sure we have only scratched the surface, but here are ten of them, with some handy links to free online resources (choose 'Sign in using your organisation's account') to help you use Teams to best effect:
- Communicate: Create channels to chat, directly message other team members, or set up voice and video calls all from within Teams. Oxford’s online learning opportunities include this handy course about creating and managing channels, give it a go.
- Collaborate: Create, edit and amend documents separately or simultaneously, with the ability to merge changes and perfect your Word, Excel and PowerPoint Documents. This helpful video shows three ways to share files in Teams.
- Meet: Arrange meetings and conduct them within Teams. With the optional Teams client for most platforms, you can also share your screen and enjoy enhanced features not available in the browser-based version of Teams. Real-time video and audio conversations in Teams are referred to as meetings; find out about meetings in this short video.
- Share: All content in Teams is available to all members of that team, share anything from links and documents, to images and other files in your Teams file areas. Find out how to upload files, how to view shared files, and explore a few management tools for the files you have uploaded to your team.
- Plan: Microsoft Planner is fully integrated with Teams. Set up tasks, to-do lists and organise these in ‘buckets’ within Planner, to track the course of a project, set milestones and visualise/chart the results. This short course, discover how to best use the tools available in Teams to maximise productivity.
- Collect data and survey your users: Microsoft Forms is also integrated with Teams allowing you to set up simple quizzes, questionnaires and surveys with the results available in your Teams files area. Learn how to get started with forms on this short course.
- Discuss: Documents and items created in Teams can be commented on directly, allowing collaborators to fine-tune created items. Here are some quick tips for sharing files including how to share files in private chat messages or to a conversation channel in a team, how to upload your files into the files tab of a channel, and how to edit files.
- Build a Wiki: Teams comes with its own simple Wiki app, allowing you to build a set of Wiki-like pages to help your users get the best out of your Team.
- Take notes: Teams integrates with Microsoft OneNote allowing you to set up Team notebooks that can either be edited directly from within Teams, or added to your own OneNote app for more advanced editing features. Here is a short introduction to OneNote for beginners.
- Evolve: Teams is constantly evolving with new features being added almost on a weekly basis, but how can you keep track of all those changes? If you really want to find out what’s new, type /whatsnew into the search bar at the top of any Teams screen!
Still not sure about it? Join us at one of our Nexus365 Toolkit workshops to have a go at using some of the tools available with expert help to hand. November dates are now available for booking and more dates for this term will be released soon.
Already an expert or want to know more? Our new Nexus365 User Group will hold its first meeting in November. Join us and learn something new!
