44 million daily active users can’t be wrong. That’s right! Microsoft Teams has 44 million daily active users. That is a jump in 12 million daily active users in the last few weeks. Entisys360 leverages Microsoft Teams for many aspects of our business so we thought it would be good to share some of our insights.
First and foremost, you may already own one of the Microsoft bundle SKUs which include Teams:
However, Microsoft wanted to make sure everyone has access to Teams during this crisis with the following: announcement. Here are some additional ways to get Teams right away if you are not already licensed for it.
Individuals
If you want to get started with Teams, here is how you can get up and running right away.
IT professionals
The self-service links above work great for individuals, but if you’re an IT professional who wants to roll out Teams centrally, here’s what to do.
So now that we cleared up on how obtain Microsoft Teams, let’s get into some of the important features to know.
Microsoft Teams has tons of features for Chat, File Sharing, Channels and Collaboration but this blog will cover some other features within Microsoft Teams.
You can also visit the “Microsoft Teams help & learning center” for end user videos on using Microsoft Teams.
Scheduling a Teams meeting is a little different than other solutions. Once you are in Teams, click on Calendar. You can now start an ad hoc meeting with “Meet now” or schedule a New meeting via Teams.
Scheduled meeting with “New meeting” or by selecting a time window in the Calendar – Title the meeting, select your required and optional attendees, select or confirm your date/time, and select if the meeting will repeat (and on what frequency). You can add a channel to allow any members of channel to attend. You can set a physical location for a meeting (probably might want wait for that one). Then click Send. As you can see below, attendees can also be external email addresses.
When it comes time to start the meeting, you can start it from your Outlook calendar or you can be in Teams, browse to your Calendar, find the meeting and click Join (the Join button will only display a few minutes before a meeting is scheduled to start).
Entisys360 ProTip : Once a meeting has been scheduled, you can open the meeting in Teams, then click Meeting Options to set the roles for the meeting (Organizer, Presenter or Attendee).
Whether it is virtual office hours or management requiring video enabled meetings to counteract social distancing, we’ve all been the person with the kids coming in the room or your office has a lot of Lego builds, swords and lightsabers that you might be embarrassed for everyone to see. The Blur Background feature is great when leveraging Microsoft Teams for a virtual meeting. Before a meeting starts, you can enable your webcam and then look for the person icon with the lines behind it (see below). Once you enable the blur background button, anything past a certain distance will be blurred out (see below again). Much better than a distracting image or having to worry about a child walk in behind you.
Microsoft Teams has some nice capabilities to manage tasks. The Planner app can be added to any channel within a team (in the screen shot below, we called our plan Tasks). New Tasks can be added by selecting +Add Task, then assigning the task to a resource, a due date and a task description. You can then edit the task to add more detail such as priority, notes, attachments or create a checklist. Buckets can be created to group tasks together.
As multiple Teams channels are assigning you tasks, you can manage all your tasks by clicking in the … under Files then locating Planner. You now can see all the Tasks you have to work on (see below) and it will then update the Teams channel tasks with the updates. If you like this feature, you can right click on Planner on the left and select Pin.
There are many others PowerApps from vendors to built-in by Microsoft. Your organization can even build their own (not that you have time for that right now).
The “Search or type a command bar” has shortcuts to make your life a little easier. Of course, you can @ someone to start a chat, but there are more commands to make you more efficient. Here are some of the ones I use while working.
Finally if you are in the market for nice headset that works with Microsoft Teams (and all the other meeting solutions), Entisys360 uses the Jabra Evolve 75. Bluetooth enabled, boom mic (lift mic to mute), stand for charging and very comfortable. It’s a nice headset.
e360 hopes some of this will help you work remotely and increase your efficiency with Microsoft Teams.
