What started as an odd app in the office 365 family is now taking the business world by storm. Even so that Microsoft has announced that Skype for Business will be replaced by the teams platform. For many people though Teams is the next Sharepoint or Skype and they are not able to use the features.
Teams from Microsoft, you love it or you hate or you don’t know so much about it. I have gone through those three opinions myself in less than a year and by now I actually really like it. But before going into the advantages from Teams it is probably good to explain a bit more about Teams for those that are still hate it or don’t know so much about it.
Teams is a place that actually is designed to collaborate as team and with this application you can collaborate in many different ways and all from the same place. When part of a team you can have all documents stored in the team site, have all conversations centrally visible to the team or specific individuals and have a common wiki page to share the common knowledge wiki style. Within the application you can chat to individuals or smaller groups and have online video meetings where you can share content and conversations.
In essence it is build on the Sharepoint and Skype for business (Lync) engine and combines these functionalities in a quite good way. It comes with every Office 365 subscription which has made that the platform is the fastest growing collaboration platforms within the business world. All the benefits from Sharepoint and Skype for business are still there through the native respective UI but you would be selling Teams short if you were to go that way.
Within Teams you can be part of different teams and that is also where the original weakness is. If you are only part of one team and that teamwork only occupies your working time partly you will find yourself forgetting about teams and this is a source of initial frustration where people find they have missed messages in teams and they feel they have yet another place to check. Once you get further or your company environment is getting further you will find that Teams is a central place for your work and it is slowly increasing your productivity. Each Team site is divided in several channels to keep topics apart. You can add tabs within each channel and this can vary from the other MS online views like PowerBI or another Website. This feature makes teamwork quite powerful as a team moderator you can make sure the entire team looks at the same information and this increases productivity.
Some tips from my side.
1) Synchronise the files to your machine through the SharePoint in the back end.
2) Manage also access control through the native SharePoint
3) Use @username to make sure the users also get a highlight of your message in an email. Especially useful in the early phases
The platform is still under development and this means there is some instabilities that you have to accept. One thing to be desired is an upgrade of the wiki functionality and method. After a while this is getting quite limited which pushes usage away from the now central place.
