Microsoft Teams is designed to provide an easier way for small groups of people to communicate and collaborate. The de facto approach of communicating via group emails and sharing files via a. Since Teams is developed by Microsoft from scratch without any legacy, it enables a more modern form of communication out of the box– with support for likes, gifs, emoticons, live link previews, etc. That enriches your communication. Better focus on your work.
- Microsoft Teams - How Does It Work
- Microsoft Teams Meeting How Does It Work
- Microsoft Teams Call How Does It Work
Microsoft Teams - How Does It Work
If you're the admin for Microsoft Teams in your organization, you're in the right place. When you're ready to get going with Teams, start with How to roll out Teams and Set up secure collaboration with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.
If you're new to Teams and want to learn more, check out our short Welcome to Teams video (55 seconds).
Don't miss our Welcome to Teams for the Teams admin video (just over 3 minutes):
If you're looking for end user Teams Help, click Help on the left side of the app, or go to the Microsoft Teams help center. For training, go to Microsoft Teams Training.
Teams architecture
Teams is built on Microsoft 365 groups, Microsoft Graph, and the same enterprise-level security, compliance, and manageability as the rest of Microsoft 365 and Office 365. Teams leverages identities stored in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Teams keeps working even when you're offline or experiencing spotty network conditions.
To see where Teams fits in the context of Microsoft 365, check out this architecture poster: Teams as part of Microsoft 365
When you create a team, here's what gets created:
- A new Microsoft 365 group
- A SharePoint Online site and document library to store team files
- An Exchange Online shared mailbox and calendar
- A OneNote notebook
- Ties into other Microsoft 365 and Office 365 apps such as Planner and Power BI
When you create a team from an existing group, that group's membership, site, mailbox, and notebook are surfaced in Teams. To learn more, check out this poster: Groups in Microsoft 365 for IT Architects
To customize and extend Teams, add third-party apps through apps, bots, and connectors. With Teams, you can include people from outside your organization by adding them as a guest to a team or channel. As part of Microsoft 365 and Office 365, Teams offers a robust development platform so you can build the teamwork hub you need for your organization.
Tip
For a deep dive into Teams architecture, watch the videos on the Teams Platform Academy.
Managing Teams
As the admin, you'll manage Teams through the Microsoft Teams admin center. For a quick orientation, watch the Manage Teams using the Teams admin center video (3:03 min):
To learn more:
To stay on top of what's coming for Teams and all other Microsoft 365 or Office 365 products and services in your organization, be sure to check Message center and the Teams roadmap. You'll get announcements about new and updated features, planned changes, and issues to help keep you informed and prepared.
Upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams
Teams is the primary client for intelligent communications in Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and it'll eventually replace Skype for Business Online. To stay on top of new features coming to Teams, see the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. To complement persistent chat and messaging capabilities, Teams offers a comprehensive meeting and calling experience, with built in, fully integrated voice and video. Check out Teams is now a complete meeting and calling solution in the Microsoft Teams Blog.
If you're running Skype for Business and are ready to upgrade to Teams, or if you're running Skype for Business and Teams side-by-side and are ready to fully move to Teams, we have the tools, tips, and guidance to help make your transition successful. To learn more, see Upgrade to Teams.
Teamwork
Every team is different; there's no one-size-fits-all approach to collaboration. Microsoft 365 and Office 365 are designed to meet the unique needs of every team, empowering people to communicate, collaborate, and achieve more with purpose-built, integrated applications.
When deciding which Microsoft 365 or Office 365 apps and services to use, think about the work your organization does and the types of conversations your teams need to have.
Teams, as the hub for teamwork, is where people - including people outside your organization - can actively connect and collaborate in real time to get things done. Have a conversation right where the work is happening, whether coauthoring a document, having a meeting, or working together in other apps and services. Teams is the place to have informal chats, iterate quickly on a project, work with team files, and collaborate on shared deliverables.
Outlook for collaborating in the familiar environment of email and in a more formal, structured manner or when targeted and direct communication is required.
SharePoint for sites, portals, intelligent content services, business process automation, and enterprise search. SharePoint keeps content at the center of teamwork, making all types of content easily shareable and accessible across teams. Tight integration with Outlook, Yammer, and Teams enables seamless content collaboration across conversation experiences.
OneDrive for Business for storing files and sharing them with people that a user invites. Content that a user saves to OneDrive for Business is private until the user shares it with others, making it the best option for storing personal and draft documents that are not intended to be shared or not ready to be shared.
Yammer to connect people across the organization. Drive company-wide initiatives, share best practices, and build communities around common topics of interest or areas of practice. Crowdsource ideas to foster open discussions with people across the company.
Office apps are all the familiar tools that people know and use regularly, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Teams content updates
See a weekly list of Teams topics that have been updated.
Teams known issues
See Teams Troubleshooting.
Teams client release notes
See What's new in Teams.
This blog was updated on June 21st, 2020 to reflect on the several changes made to Microsoft Teams over the year.
Working with Microsoft 365 (Office 365) adoption we often get asked about Microsoft Teams – what are the pros and cons? Should we start using it – How do we explain it to our users. For many organizations that are already onboard the Microsoft 365 journey, the question is not if, it is when and how. Microsoft has made a strategic decision on Teams as the application for intelligent communication, discontinuing their investments in Skype for Business. But people don’t like being pushed into using something unless they see the benefits of doing so. What are the advantages of moving to Microsoft Teams?
In April 2018, we wrote an article called, “Is your organization ready for Microsoft Teams?” In the blog post, we listed some of the benefits and some of the disadvantages with Microsoft Teams. These points are still valid, but they focus more on the pros and cons of the application itself. In this blog post, I’d like to focus on the pros and cons of Microsoft Teams from a business perspective.
Pros of Microsoft Teams
1. Productivity gains and enriched communication
The breadth of collaboration tools offered in Microsoft 365 can often leave users disoriented. Teams increases productivity by making all your collaboration– conversations, chats, online meetings, shared files, tasks, etc. available in one single app and one single interface. In addition to the widely used apps from Microsoft, you have a wide range of 3rd party apps that integrate into Teams so that your users never have to leave the Teams app to get their work done.
Since Teams is developed by Microsoft from scratch without any legacy, it enables a more modern form of communication out of the box– with support for likes, gifs, emoticons, live link previews, etc. that enriches your communication.
2. Better focus on your work
With Teams, you can easier focus your attention on work-related topics and prioritize your time better. Instead of spending time going through an inbox that contains messages from everyone about everything, Teams compartmentalizes information into channels and puts your information in context. The channel only contains conversations, meetings and documents related to the topic of that specific channel. So instead of getting side-tracked with random email, or get stuck trying to clean up your inbox, you can focus your valuable attention and spend your limited time on the channels where you actually do your work.
3. Increased transparency
A big challenge for many organizations is keeping everyone in the loop and making everyone feel that they know what is going on. With Teams, this becomes so much easier. No longer do you have to worry about who to put on cc in an email or who to invite to a meeting. With Teams, you post your message in the relevant channel, @-mention the people you want to get notified and leave it for everyone else to read if they want, and by having meetings visible to everyone in the channel you increase transparency by enabling everyone in the channel to “pop-in”.
4. Seamless move to a digital workplace
There are so many business benefits of moving to a digital workplace in the cloud. Since Teams is a fully cloud-based solution, the move to the cloud is seamless. Being able to access information from anywhere on any device is a huge business benefit. In addition, with your workplace in the cloud, you can reap the benefits of big data processing and artificial intelligence to work smarter.
If you work in a multilingual organization, you can benefit from automatic translations of conversations.
If you missed a meeting you can easily tune in to the part of the meeting that is of interest to you by searching for particular words that were said in the video recording of the meeting – just to name a few.
5. New team members can more quickly get up to speed
In today’s agile workplace where we can easily source talent from anywhere in the world, getting people quickly up to speed is imperative. With Teams, you can quickly get new team members up to speed and engaged in the teamwork – no matter where in the world they are located.
Cons of Microsoft Teams
1. Difficult transition from Outlook
The best way to transition to Teams is for everyone who is a member of a team to fully embrace Teams and stop using Outlook all together (except for external communication). However, since there is still a deeply connected dependency on Outlook in Office 365 this becomes a challenge.
If you are editing a document in Word and send a sharing link to a team member, there is no option to send this via a Teams chat, the link is sent via email.
Currently, Teams does not support Group calendars, so to see your Team/Group calendar you have to switch to Outlook.
2. Structure of files confuse users
Millennials and Generation Z don’t care “where” files are physically stored, they just search for what they need. Many users still like to know “where” a file is located and go through a folder structure to find it. The way files are stored in Teams can be quite confusing. Everything that is uploaded to conversations is dumped in the channel root folder. If someone tries to organize the files and move them into properly named folders, the file links in the conversations break.
If you move a document to a new folder in Teams, the link to the documents with all conversations is broken.
3. Non-optimal online meeting experience hinders adoption
Microsoft has been working hard to include the Skype for Business meeting functionality into Teams and they have done a good job an also added new capabilities that weren’t there before. But the meeting experience still isn’t ideal, there are some things that are still not very intuitive and it doesn’t promote some of the great capabilities available in Teams for meetings (such as note-taking in OneNote). For users to embrace something as important as online meetings, they need to feel extremely comfortable with the tool.
Microsoft Teams Meeting How Does It Work
Note: To learn more about recommendations for online meetings in Microsoft Teams see our blog post 5 tips to run effective online meetings with Microsoft Teams.
4. Challenges regarding permission settings
One of the key benefits with Teams is that it makes sharing so easy. Everyone who is a member of the Team automatically has access to all the channels and all the files in the Team, the same OneNote notebook, and so on. This is all great. But teamwork isn’t always that binary. Sometimes you want to differentiate and make permission settings more granular – which is not possible at the moment. You can create private channels in a team to create unique permissions for a specific channel (for instance “Management”), but you don’t have the ability to invite “guest users” to selected channels.
Say that you want to bring in a consultant to work on one of your customer projects. If you have a team for customer projects with a channel for each engagement, that consultant would see all other projects – unless you make all channels private (which isn’t recommended due to many of the limitations).
5. Limited flexibility can lead to manual replications
When you start working in Teams you don’t have the structure ready from start. You don’t know which channels you need, you might not know exactly what Teams you need to create. This evolves over time with the work that you do. Currently, the building blocks of Teams aren’t’ very flexible (you can’t move channels between teams). This sometimes leads to time wasted doing manual replications.
Say that you have a team for marketing activities. You start planning an event and create a channel for it. As the event grows, you realize that you need to create a separate Team for the event with additional team members. Currently, you would have to create a new team from scratch and manually copy or move relevant information.
Microsoft Teams Call How Does It Work
The cons of Teams are still related to the application itself, and many of these issues are being addressed. Still, it’s important to be aware of them and to properly guide users, if you don’t – you won’t be able to reap the benefits.
Changing the way people do their work is not a question about switching from one technology to another, it’s about changing the behavior of people. For many this behavior, habits, or style of work, have been ingrained over decades. It’s naïve to think that is can be done overnight without any efforts. However, if you invest the time and you put in the efforts – the rewards are enormous!
If you need help in your digital workplace transformation journey Storyals can help. See our “Enhance Teamwork” Storyals topic here or book a demo with us so that we can show you how.
Don’t forget to check out our other Microsoft Teams blogs here.