6 min readWhat is Microsoft Teams?

Published Date:

November 9, 2016

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Microsoft Teams is a part of Office 365 service which helps teams to
collaborate better by integrating team conversations, Files, Notes and
Planner altogether from one place. Simply, Microsoft teams is a
combination of Office 365 Groups (Exchange, SharePoint, One Note, Team
Site, Planner) and Skype for Business (Conversations, Calls, Video). It
is available for Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, and
Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 plans.

Let’s jump in.

Technical requirements required for all users

SharePoint Online
Exchange Online / On premises

How to enable Microsoft Teams for your tenant?

It’s simple. Login to your admin portal as tenant admin and you can find
‘Microsoft Teams’ under ‘Services & Add-ins’.

Now users in your tenant can able to see ‘Teams’ tile in their app
launcher or can access it directly from teams.microsoft.com

How to create Teams?

As Microsoft Teams is built on top of Office 365 Groups, you have the
ability to reuse existing Office 365 Groups. Click on ‘Create Team’ and
you be presented with option to create your new team or pick the one
from Office365 Groups for which you are the admin. When a team is
created from existing Groups, Teams will utilize the meta details of the
Groups such as group description and group members which makes the team
creation task more simple.

Team & Channels

A team can own Channels under it. This helps to organize its documents,
Tasks and Conversations. Ex: You can create Sales and Marketing team and
can have Channels such as Sales, Corporate Marketing, Product Marketing,
etc.. By default a channel named General will be created when you create
a Team. Each channel will get place for Conversations, Files, OneNote,
Planner, SharePoint and Connectors. You can add the additional tabs to
channels as shown below

You can able to add connectors to each channel as shown below

And add your favourite connectors.

For this sample, I have added Twitter connector and can able to see the
tweets start appearing in channel conversation page.

Conversations

Conversations play key role in Microsoft Teams as it is closely
integrated with Skype for team Audio and Video chat experience with the
ability to establish Private conversations with individuals. Users can
build conversations based on SharePoint Documents (Files), OneNote
(Notes) and Planner. Documents can be easily uploaded to OneDrive or
SharePoint documents from conversations page itself.

Surprised with simplicity in Conversations? To excite you more, you can
able to save conversations for future reference just by clicking on
Bookmark icon against each conversation.

Chat

Users can establish One to One conversations with any users in the
Group. As Microsoft teams are integrated with Skype for Business, chat
from Skype for Business will also appear on Teams Chat window

Meetings

Establishing Meetings with your team members has never been so easy as
in Microsoft Teams. Meeting details are fetched from user’s calendar
which lists all meetings (Skype, Microsoft Teams and Outlook) of the
respective user. User can start / join Skype and Microsoft Teams meeting
directly from this view.

Interesting Snippets

Ability to link SharePoint Document Libraries

SharePoint document libraries can be linked to channels by adding it as
a new tab. Click on ‘+’ in channel page and select SharePoint. Now need
to enter your SharePoint document library url and click on next. Linking
of SharePoint Document library is complete. Once the document library is
linked you can able to find a new folder named ‘General’ automatically
created in the document library. You need to move your existing files to
this folder in order to use this from Microsoft Teams.

Add Microsoft Teams to an existing Office 365 group – All groups are not listed

When you try to use your existing Office365 Groups for Microsoft Teams,
the Office 365 Groups should meet the following conditions to get it
listed in the ‘Create Team’ window.