MS Teams

By Niels Tietgen (s193191).

Abstract

Microsoft Teams - in short MS Teams or just Teams - is the name of a cloud-based collaboration and communication platform developed by the Microsoft company that allows for document collaboration, presentation, and white-boarding capabilities in addition to their more well-known communication features.

Within Microsoft 365, MS Teams is the central place for digital collaboration. Microsoft Teams enables group chats, joint work on documents, news feeds, video and telephone conferences, online meetings and much more. In addition, a shareable cloud storage space is provided. The platform can be used from various devices such as PCs, laptops, smartphones or tablets. Supported operating systems are Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux.

MS Teams is combining earlier known digital tools like Skype (for Business), Clouds or Drives, and several more. Furthermore, Teams is widely used by multiple companies and institutions to provide connectivity and communicate across locations and during home office. Therefore, “the software skyrocketed in popularity during [the COVID pandemic] lockdown, reaching 44 million active users by March and 75 million by April“ .

At the centre of the various functions of Microsoft Teams are the so-called teams. These are groups that are created by a group administrator (team owner) and include people inside or outside a company or organisation. For example, members of a department, a project or a learning community can be gathered in a team.

As already mentioned MS Teams is providing the basic features like

• individual calls and video group meetings; scheduled and short notice
• document share point organized in different projects and portfolios
• providing space for polls and surveys

and furthermore focusing directly the topic of project management with tools like Gantt charts, timelines and task managers.

Additional features of MS Teams are

• transparent sharing of overall information
• tracking of deadlines
• individual organized accessibility to project folders
• clear timeline and time tracking
• monitoring progress and task management
• organizing documents, notes and calendars
• navigating between several projects and portfolios with individual accessibility
• providing flexibility and transparency
• it offers multiple add-ons like Microsoft Planner, Azure DevOps, Jira, and Microsoft Project

Features

Teams (or Groups)

In Microsoft Teams, groups - called Teams - can be created to which people inside or outside the company or project can be invited. One or more channels are available in a team. Each channel consists of tabs. By default, there are the tabs Contributions and Files. The location for files in the Files tab is the organisation's SharePoint Online. Additional tabs of different purposes or apps for further functions can be added.

Messaging

Within a team, selected members can set up channels. Channels are conversation topics that allow team members to communicate without using (broadcast) email or another additional app or software. In addition to classic text messages, members can also reply to posts with images, videos, GIFs (, ...).

Direct messages allow members to send private messages to one or more people. Direct messaging is useful when a message is not relevant to all members of a channel or team or is particularly confidential.

Calling

Instant private calling Voice over IP (VoIP) Calls on the public telephone network Video conferencing MS Teams supports conferencing on the public switched telephone network, which allows users to call numbers from the client or dial in to a conference using a Microsoft-provided number and specifying the conference ID.

Meeting

Meetings can be scheduled or created ad-hoc. Members of the channel can see that a meeting is currently running as well as participate in it. MS Teams also has a plugin for Microsoft Outlook to invite others to a team meeting. Meetings can be recorded and later made available to other users on Microsoft Stream.

Teams for Education

Teams for Education allows administrators and teachers to set up special teams for classes, professional learning communities or staff.

Teachers are able to provide feedback and assess student assignments assigned through Teams via a special tab available to Office 365 for Education subscribers. Through Office Forms integration, assignments can also be assigned to students or pupils.

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Action-oriented Roles

• individual calls and video group meetings; scheduled and short notice
• document share point organized in different projects and portfolios
• providing space for polls and surveys

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