We recently completed a series of webinars on the functionality of Microsoft Teams. If you couldn’t attend, you can watch the sessions on-demand here. We highly recommend you check out these recordings!
Before Teams began receiving widespread attention, the Microsoft Office collaboration tools were siloed based on function, for example, Outlook and Exchange for messaging, and SharePoint for document storage. You had to switch between the programs to accomplish work. But no longer. Microsoft is pushing Teams as the future platform from which almost all applications will be launched. As Microsoft invests in the future, it is worthwhile to understand the direction.
Continuing along that theme, Teams received top billing at the recent Microsoft Ignite virtual event. We’ve compiled a summary of some of the takeaways in Teams for Microsoft 365 customers.
SharePoint Online
You can now access your SharePoint home site (your organization’s intranet gateway) from within Teams, finally joining visually what belongs together.
If your Team sites is connected to a Microsoft 365 group in SharePoint, you can add the home page to Teams. Team sites that are not already connected to a group will first need to connect to a Microsoft 365 group before they can be added to Microsoft Teams. You can read more here.
Then you’ll be able to use real-time chat, virtual meeting capabilities, and extended collaboration features in your SharePoint team site. Here’s a great blog post from the Microsoft Tech Community on using SharePoint and Teams together in a myriad of ways.
Outlook
Outlook email integration with Teams continues to be improved with features that make it easy to share information between email in Outlook and chat or channel conversations in Teams. Here’s a few:
· Meet Now in Outlook desktop—launches Teams Meet now
· Access Teams meeting options from Outlook
· Set Teams as default when creating Outlook meetings
· Drag Outlook attachments directly into files in Teams
· Respond to Outlook messages directly from Teams
· Sync out-of-office messages with Outlook
You can read more here about how to use the integration. We also found a great video with step-by-step instructions on how to set up some of these features.
OneDrive
OneDrive is your personal cloud storage. It’s a backup we’ve all been using for some time, but you can share those files securely with your Teams colleagues, where you can co-author documents while meeting and chatting with people inside or outside your organization. If you’re already working as a team — in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or Outlook—you should save your files where your team works, because OneDrive for work or school connects you to all your shared libraries, too.
Coming later this month, you’ll be able to attach files directly from Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, as well as attach a generic link for content that is hosted outside of Microsoft 365.
For every user, the OneDrive folder Microsoft Teams Chat Files is used to store all files shared within private chats with others who have permissions. Look here for detailed information about the Teams/OneDrive integration and upcoming plans.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint Live Presentations is a feature that allows everyone in a Teams meeting to navigate their view of a live slide presentation. It lets you provide feedback in the form of live reactions, comments, and presentation ratings once the meeting is complete. Right now, Live Presentations are generally available on PowerPoint for the web. However, Microsoft recently announced plans to bring this functionality to Teams.
It’s a win for both presenters and attendees. As a presenter, you can now lead meetings with a single view of your notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants. Attendees can also personalize their experience by navigating the content at their own pace. Learn more here.
Next Steps
If you are making and managing the Teams decisions for your organization, you’ll need to be prepared to manage Office 365 groups, SharePoint team sites and OneDrive for Business.
Watch the following session to learn how Teams interacts with Azure Active Directory (AAD), Microsoft 365 Groups, Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. Also, Skype for Business Online retires on July 31, 2021, so you’ll want to move your online chat and meet now functionality to Teams before then.
As Microsoft releases new features, we can help. Our ongoing client education is a fundamental element of our long-term partnership approach. If you need assistance, please contact us.