Microsoft Teams is here – and we’re excited!

We’ve been giving things a good test drive in the preview period, and are beginning to roll Microsoft Teams out at Theta. This means we’re ready to help you and your organisation make the most of Teams.

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What is Microsoft Teams good for?

Teams brings everything a team needs together in one place. It's a place for work to happen in the open and in real time. Microsoft Teams is a great way to collaborate, with persistent chat, file sharing, instant meetings and more. All your familiar Office 365 apps are there already – Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, Planner and more – plus other services built in.

The possibility to add website tabs means any web-based service can be integrated into your Teams experience. Whether your team uses Trello, Jira, or something else, you can have a single interface for all your work.

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Some of the apps you can integrate into Microsoft Teams

You can also add bots to your teams to help you work smarter. Add a bot to help you schedule meetings, collect feedback, run polls or analytics, organise travel and more – and our chatbot experts can help with this.

Microsoft Teams is now a viable alternative to Slack for Office 365 users – and especially compelling given the combination of chat with document collaboration. If you have a commercial Office 365 plan, Microsoft Teams is part of the package from today, and includes built in file organisation and storage, and integration to other Office 365 tools.

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Microsoft Teams, Office 365 and SharePoint

If you are wondering what to use – Teams, Groups or SharePoint - here’s the quick summary: Microsoft Teams actually uses Office 365 Groups behind the scenes. It provides a new, and in our view, much better way to access the shared assets for an Office 365 Group and improves on the collaboration aspects significantly.

The Files tab in Microsoft Teams uses SharePoint for storage – a SharePoint site document library is created behind the scenes for each team (and a folder per channel). Users can also add a document library from an existing SharePoint site to the tabs for any channel.

For advanced SharePoint features, team users can go to the relevant site in SharePoint, where they can manage files, apply workflow, review version history, and comply with document retention policies.

SharePoint is still the best solution for traditional intranets and where published web content is required, as well as for workflow solutions and custom solutions including forms. Teams can offer some of these features in a different way - via the ability to use and create your own bots.

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What do users think?

We asked some of the people at Theta already using Teams, here’s what they had to say:

For me I love it and really like the ease of use. The reply, follow channel, and favourite options are a huge help when managing requests and staying up to date with my team members. The UI is simple and easy to use, the ability to embed web pages like Trello is a huge plus helping us all stay on the same page, manage work and collaborate easily.

The best part I am finding is the file management. It offers a great way to keep work flow, collaboration and files in one central location. The ability to upload, replace and share work is really invaluable, especially when trying to work in a fast, agile way with team members across the country. Keeping the conversation and pieces of work at my fingertips in the office or on the go on my phone.