I consider myself as an early adopter. I was a skateboarder before Michael J Fox made it cool in Back to the Future and I had curtains before David Beckham could even kick a ball…….
And I was also a huge fan of Microsoft Teams before COVID-19 arrived and then suddenly everyone was signing up to it!
But, despite its rising popularity, many businesses still aren’t using teams to its full potential. It’s of course a surprisingly easy bit of kit to use ‘out of the box’ and trumps Zoom by a long way. Mainly because it’s much more than just video calling platform
But you all know this anyway? Right! Or do you?
Sure, Teams is great for video calling but Microsoft are constantly updating its features – only recently did it launch the breakout rooms feature and the increased group chat to 250 ( which is very much welcomed!)
But one of the biggest benefits of Teams is essentially that – Teams.
You can create a Team within seconds, whether it’s for a project, meeting or social chat with your colleagues. Once you have created a Team, everything and anything that matters to that project or meeting is there all in one place – hallelujah! No more trawling through your inbox and hundreds of emails trying to find that email about that conversation amongst all your other projects, jobs and messages.
Then there’s the integration with a host of other apps and systems. My favourite to date has to be the equally awesome Microsoft Planner. Planner layers a whole new level of project management into Teams with the ability to create tasks for projects, but more importantly it integrates into Teams so not only do you have all the conversations about a project in one place, but you also have all the tasks everyone has been allocated as well. Amazing.
My final shout-out for Teams is the ability to load up files into your Team. Again, a superb, but simple idea. No more scurrying around shared drives and asking colleagues to send links to you – just head to the Files tab at the top of your Team and hey presto all the files for this job or project are there. Simple, or as Doc Brown in Back to the Future would say “Great Scott!”
