Office 365 – Microsoft Teams Introduction – Part 1

In this article I’ll discuss basics about Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft teams are around quite some time. Recently got a chance to work on Microsoft Team. So I started the understanding and hands-on. But I strongly believe best way to learn is to share, discussions, get feedback, get comments. So this blog.

But today we will discuss basics and will continue in upcoming series. In these series of articles we will cover details for developers, admins. We will try to cover each and every concept, integrations for Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft defines Microsoft Teams as – Chat based workspace in Office 365. It brings together workplace chat, meetings, notes, attachments, document sharing and so on. Easily integrated with other services like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and so on.

To start with “Microsoft Teams”, log in to our Office 365 (https://www.office.com/), there in Apps we will have Teams app as

Figure 1 : Microsoft Teams app

Alternatively, we can directly go to the URL – https://teams.microsoft.com/start and enter our Office 365 user id (email address) as

Figure 2 : Microsoft Teams Site URL

Microsoft Teams are available in following Office 365 licenses (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/office-365-licensing ).

Table 1 : Microsoft Teams – Teams available in above Licenses

On click of “Teams” app, we will be redirected to teams site (https://teams.microsoft.com/_#/discover ) and “Teams” menu selected from left side navigation as

Figure 3 : Microsoft Teams – “Teams” menu from left side navigation bar

From the above page we can create our different – different teams like Project Team, Event Team, QA team and so on. Click on “Create Team” button, “Create your team” dialog will appear as

Figure 4 : Microsoft Teams – “Create your team” dialog

After entering team name, Next button will be enabled. We can also create team for our existing Office 365 group, we will discuss this in next article.

On “Next” button click we will have progress dialog and then “Add members” dialog will appear where we need to add team members as

Figure 5 : Microsoft Teams – “Add Members” dialog to add team members

We can set member either “Owner” or “Member”.  Once we created team, team members can start “Conversations”, share Files and so on as

Figure 6 : Microsoft Teams – New team created

But we will cover each and every details in coming articles.

Here, other important feature to highlight here is “Chat” menu from the left navigation, T-Bot. T-Bot is bot which we can use to questions regarding Microsoft Teams as

Figure 7 : Microsoft Teams – Chat – T-Bot

T-Bot also contains some important tabs like “Help”, “FAQ”, “Videos” and “Release Notes”.  Release Notes tab contains all the details of release in each month. So we will be always up to date.

Figure 8 : Microsoft Teams – T-Bot -” Help” tab

We will have our profile details and availability at the bottom in left navigation as

Figure 9 : Microsoft Teams – Profile details

Also we will have desktop app and mobile apps are available for Microsoft Teams, will explore those as well in coming articles.

Keep reading, share your thoughts, experiences. Feel free to contact us to discuss more. If you have any suggestion / feedback / doubt, you are most welcome.

Stay tuned on Knowledge-Junction, will come up with more such articles.

Thanks for reading 🙂

References:

https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-teams-the-chat-based-workspace-in-office-365/?eu=true

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/Teams-overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Teams