Discover the Potential of Microsoft Teams

Are you using Teams to its full potential?

In this digital age, super useful apps pop up everywhere: "organize your teams with Asana, Slack, WhereBy, Monday, Comeen, Trello, Notion, and more," they say.

These apps may or may not be comparable; the idea is to see whether you can use your existing tools before looking elsewhere.

The basics: Understanding Teams

What is a team? A team is several people collaborating. It includes an email address and a SharePoint site, in addition to what you find in Teams. Collaborators can be internal or external to the company. A team is also the container for channels.

So what are channels? A channel is a place to communicate within the team and a container for tabs.

And... what is a tab? This is where the fun begins. A tab can serve different purposes. It can be used to hold conversations and comment on them; it can be notes, files, a wiki page, and more. There can be multiple tabs.

A better understanding

If we draw an analogy with folders:

Only employees who work in sales should access the "*sales*" folder. (Several people collaborating: Teams team) Then within this folder, there are the "Prospects" and "Quotes" folders. (Channels) In "Quotes," you put notes and to-do checklists (Tabs)

Putting teams and channels into practice

Here are some use cases that can help you. These suggestions are provided as examples.

Use case #1

In the context of a company offering professional services such as lawyers, accountants, or IT services, here's one way to operate:

One team for your company, the General channel used for internal matters, and one channel per client for client-specific information.

*Use case #2* You can also create one team per department:

Then each department is free to create the channels it needs.

*Use case #3* On the other hand, if your company is smaller and there's no need to segregate that much, you can always go on a smaller scale, for example creating one channel per department.

Then each department is free to add the tabs it requires.

The default tabs

Once the naming convention and architecture are created, you can customize the tabs. Keep in mind that each tab is an application, and there are 3 default tabs when a Teams channel is created:

Posts: On the same principle as a Facebook group, you can start discussions and members can comment.

Files: A folder is automatically created on your SharePoint site under the team's name, then a subfolder is created per channel so you can store your Word files, PDFs, and any other documents related to the channel.

Below is the folder for the "My Company" team within the "General" channel's folder.

Wiki: Where you can document information that's quick and easy to access. It's a browsable site with different pages and several sections per page.

That's not all! You can add hundreds of applications as tabs. You can even have 2 of the same type of tab. If you need 2 wiki pages for different topics in the same channel, just add it. You can also add a web page straight from the internet; if your team needs to consult a page on a particular site, you can keep it within reach as a tab.

*Microsoft is removing the Wiki from Teams and prioritizing the use of OneNote. For those who were already using it, the Wiki tabs remain, but it's no longer possible to add new ones.

Our favourite tabs

This post only covers the main tabs, but here are some favourite tabs used at MMO Techno:

Tasks by Planner and To Do: It's a Kanban-style board where you can add tasks, drag them between columns, assign tasks, create labels for different topics, and set due dates. In short, it's a simple and fairly complete Kanban.

Integration with OneNote: Import notebooks directly into the channel.

Workflows and connectors

You can take your use of Teams even further by automating things with what are called connectors.

For a concrete example, car salespeople want to stay on top of new listings. So they set up an alert on the listings site to send an email to ventes@fausseadresse.com , and the connector will *post* each email as a new post in the sales channel. Users can comment on each post and view them as they please without getting "spammed" by a flood of emails.

Feature overview

• You can restrict access to channels and/or teams to members of the organization.
• You can also collaborate with members external to your organization in teams and channels.
• Notifications can be configured to the user's preferences.
• You can put your favourite emoji in the title of a channel or a team.

In conclusion

If you already use Teams, we're curious to know your favourite feature and how you use Teams internally. If you have questions or want advice, we'd be happy to answer. Let us know whether it would be useful for you to have more details on implementing one of the features mentioned above, and whether you'd like technical explanations on how to proceed.

The MMO Techno team