Microsoft Teams: A Beginner's Guide to Teams in Microsoft 365
07 Aug 2024 | Lisa Treasure
Microsoft Teams is now one of the most popular applications within Microsoft 365, enabling team meetings, audio and video calls, instant chat and team announcements amongst other things. Since launching in 2017, Microsoft Teams has replaced Skype for Business (which retired in 2021) and introduced many new features, now serving as a central platform to access many of the other Microsoft 365 products and features.
This article is a guide to using Microsoft Teams and the features within it, to help you get the most from the application.
Looking to implement more of Microsoft 365? Our on-demand webinar outlines our recommended phasing for rolling out all the features within Microsoft 365, many of which are often under-utilised. You can watch this here.
Within one window, users can call upon a variety of key Microsoft 365 apps and tools to help them work more effectively, such as:
Calendars and meetings (Outlook)
Create, share, edit and find content (SharePoint, OneDrive and OneNote)
Call and meet team members
Chat and instant messaging
Manage shifts patterns (Shifts)
Access tasks (To Do and Planner)
Access and integrate third party apps
Key benefits of Teams
One centralised hub
Microsoft 365 integration
Customise Teams through APIs and bot frameworks
Enterprise security & compliance
Entra ID integration
Included with Microsoft 365 (except Enterprise licensing)
Using Teams
Before getting started it’s important to understand how Teams fits into the larger Microsoft 365 picture, as creating Teams has some wider implications. Every Team created will automatically create a matching Plan (find out more on this in our Guide to Planner here), SharePoint Team Site, Office 365 Group and shared OneNote. While this brings a number of great benefits, such as shared documents and centralised team information, it can cause some governance and admin headaches. Luckily, the admin side of Teams allows this to be managed as we’ll cover below.
Overview
Once your organisation has access to Teams, you can: download the desktop application, access Teams through your browser or download the mobile app.
Teams and Channels
To start your teamwork collaboration, you need a team. Setting up Teams is easy and done in a few clicks, requiring a Team name and a description; this then allows team members to be added. As mentioned above, a new Team will create a matching Office 365 Group, OneNote, SharePoint site and Plan—so this does need to be done with some caution.
Each Team has subsections, which are called Channels, and a General Channel will automatically be created. You can have multiple Channels within a Team; for example, you could have a ‘Marketing’ Team and then Channels such as ‘Social Media’, ‘Product Launch’, ‘Blogs’ etc. Or a Company could be a Team and Channels can relate to departments – you can choose whatever suits your organisation’s way of working. Whenever there is a new notification or activity, the Channel will become bold.
Channel Tabs
Each Channel all have their own tabs along the top. Posts (group chat), Files (shared documents) and Notes (shared OneNote) are automatically created and you can then add your own tabs.
Posts
Posts are one of the key features of Teams, allowing each Team to have a centralised discussion that is saved and easily searchable. Conversations are the central component where all teamwork is recorded—from file sharing to video calls.
The use of @mentions allows you to tag participants or even whole teams to notify others. Users that look at Conversations will easily see where they have been mentioned through the red @ symbol to highlight areas of importance to them. On top of this, your desktop app will notify you through an alert. As well as tagging, users can ‘like’ content and share emoticons or GIFs.
Files
In your Teams window, you can perform a variety of tasks directly within that window or browser, so that you avoid flicking between different applications. These tasks include the ability to delete, download, move files, open, copy, edit or get a link to share with others – giving you all the key features you would get in the native apps.
You can also start a Group chat alongside the file, to allow team discussions while all working on the files – and this conversation will appear in your Conversation thread.
View team files, edit, upload and create
Notes
Notes takes you to the Team shared OneNote. Within Teams you can view and edit your OneNotes (directly within the Teams window) or you can click to edit in the OneNote app.
Edit within TeamsEdit in OneNote
Adding Tabs
As mentioned, as well as these three automatic tabs you can also add your own, which currently include Planner, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Power BI dashboards and more.
Microsoft products can easily be added, however there are also hundreds of third party apps and products that can be added as tabs and integrated within Teams, such as YouTube, Asana, Canva and more.
Asana Integration
Menu
Along the left-hand side you can navigate to different areas within Teams, such as Chats, Teams, Calendar, Files and Activity. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory:
Activities Shows you the last activities of the Teams that you are part of.
Chat This holds your instant messaging (IM) conversations, providing a complete chat history. However, for a chat within a Team you should use the Teams menu and hold the group chat in ‘Posts.
Teams An overview of all your Teams that you are part of and allows you to drill-down into each Channel within the Teams. This is also where you can create Teams.
Calendar The Calendar tab pulls your meetings in from Outlook and also allows you schedule meetings, webinars, town halls and live events – both internally and externally as you would within Outlook.
OneDrive Previously called ‘Files’ the OneDrive tab allows you to quickly browse files from within OneDrive, filtering by recent, file type, favourites and location.
Admin
Microsoft Teams is a great product already as it allows great flexibility and gives you many possibilities. However, as mentioned earlier, getting started with Teams can also bring some knock-on effects, which can cause admin headaches. Luckily, within the Office 365 Admin, you can control Teams settings within the Groups control panel. Within Admin settings, you can control who can create teams, what features are or are not allowed, such as video meetings, screen sharing or animated images or if extensions can be used. This gives the control required to allow governance in line with your organisation’s policy and ensures you can keep control over the app. Find out more here.
Is Teams available within Microsoft 365? Teams is included within the Business licences but is not included within the Enterprise licences and need to be licensed as an Enterprise add-on. You can read more on this here.
Conclusion
Microsoft Teams is a powerful solution that is now used by many, however it is only one piece of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. We recommend ensuring that you are using all the tools and features available within your Microsoft 365 licensing to maximise the value of your licensing – especially with security and compliance. We have a recommended Microsoft 365 implementation roadmap – you can view the full video and phases here to help you with your adoption journey.
