Hello. Jarrett here with Alliance IT to talk to you about Microsoft Teams. You may or may not have heard of the program before but with recent updates to Office 365, most of you probably have that now. You may have seen a new icon show up in your programs that you have available to you.
Microsoft used to have Skype for Business that they were pushing out and a lot of you may have used that and they just recently stopped making that a thing that’s offered when you install the newest version and instead you get Microsoft Teams with it.
Microsoft Teams is much more powerful than Skype for Business ever was and is more comparable to programs like Slack for instance if you’ve ever used that. That’s something that you can also use for free.
So all these programs have to do with interoffice communications if you will or just being able to chat and communicate with others through text. They usually allow you to share files. Some can share video and audio but usually it’s mostly for instant messaging back and forth to maybe get a quick question and answer, that type of thing.
Microsoft Teams however did replace Skype for Business as I said. If you have Office 365, you most likely already have it available to you, some of the licensing. For instance, Business Essentials, Premium or Enterprise E1, E3 seem to be pretty much what all of our clients have. So obviously if you’re one of our clients and you have Office 365 through us or on your own or we support it or whatever, you most likely already have this licensing as this is most typical of what we deal with.
You can create groups within the program itself, so that you can sort of departmentalize your chat conversations, so you can have accounting for example or marketing or customer service or sales and you can build these individual teams so that the communication in that group is more specific to that task for example.
It’s also very friendly. I notice that – throughout a lot of your social media platforms, when you respond to somebody for example or you want to reply to a very specific comment, you’re able to do that. You’re able to like people’s comments with an emoji or GIF to keep it fun and light-hearted.
One of the things that Skype, Skype for Business, Slack – Cisco Spark I think was one that we used at one point. When you’re having a conversation with somebody, sometimes when you do have maybe a group that has a larger number of people, you’re trying to respond to maybe a message that was like four messages ago and sometimes it gets sort of lost because other people are commenting and the conversation kind of gets messed up.
So you end up having to either take as a one-on-one conversation maybe to address that issue or somehow they figure out that you answered their question. But one thing that I like about Microsoft Teams is you can actually directly reply to somebody’s comment even if it’s five, six, ten messages above where you currently are, which I thought was a really neat feature. So you’re able to directly address a question without having to comment down below.
You’re also able to do what they call mentions. Kind of like how nowadays everybody on social media, they’re using hash tags, so that you can search things or you can do the “at” and then their username for example. With that at-username style, it’s called a mention and you can actually do that now in Microsoft Teams.
So if you’re trying to – if you have a group and there are 10 members in that group and you want to specifically ask Mike a question, you can say “@Mike” and it will pull from your directory. So if you have multiple Mikes for example, it will give you which one and you can easily pick which one you’re looking for.
So one thing that I think is really cool is you can also screen-share which isn’t something that the previous programs that I know of anyways, they offered. So for example, if I want to show somebody how to do something or I can have them connect to my computer, I can instantly share my screen. I can pick which monitor if I have multiple monitors that I do want to share.
Then I can even take it a step further and give them control. So say for example you need help with something. So you give me access and I connect and then you can give me control and I could actually show you step by step how to do something.
Me being the technician, working for the IT company, I have control anyways. I do it all the time. But this is great for those people that work together or maybe are working on a project or maybe working on a presentation or maybe you work in an environment where you guys use stuff like Photoshop or InDesign and you’re not sure how to do something. This is a great way to have another employee be able to connect and help you do that or a billing procedure for example or something like that.
So that’s really cool and it’s instant. You can also use – you can schedule meetings like you would like GoToMeeting for example. You can schedule meetings that way. You can do presentations like I said. You can also use it for communications. So if you have a headset or headphones for example, you can plug them in and you can use that and you can communicate right through the program while you’re screen-sharing or not screen-sharing, without having to make an actual phone call for instance.
Like I said before, you can like and comment on messages, send emojis and friendly chatter. If you are an organization that actually wants to limit that ability, you can actually control that as well. You can set up a team or a group and you can say, hey, we want this group to be more serious and we don’t want people commenting or making jokes and carrying on with banter or whatever. We want to keep it highly professional. You can actually limit the ability of somebody being able to make an emoji or post GIFs and stuff like that, which is good to have I guess and I guess the last thing that I want to mention – I haven’t messed with any of them yet, but there’s a whole bunch of connectors and like add-ons that you can actually add into the program, like monitors for example.
Not that I know that you would want to do this but like Twitter. So if you had a company Twitter account, you guys want to be able to monitor that. You can actually connect that to a group and you would get live feeds and updates into that group, so you would actually be able to stay on top of it.
But there’s also – besides the social media portion of that, there’s a lot of other programs as well that tie into more direct business apps. Like I said, I haven’t explored that too much but I think it’s something like 80 are available so a very large number. I don’t personally have one at the moment that I use. Either way, I know that it’s available and so I’m sure eventually I will find something that works out great.
Anyways, if you guys have any questions, as always, give us a call. We could help you out, point you in the right direction. We’ve been using Teams for probably a few weeks now and I really like it. So anyways, you all have a good one.
