Cappuccino Chat - Episode 24 - MS Teams - More Than Just Online Meetings!

welcome back to another episode this time we're talking about microsoft teams now i know a lot of you probably are familiar with microsoft teams but did you know that you can use microsoft teams for more than just online meetings let's get into it so this time we're talking about microsoft teams now i'm sure we're all familiar with it it's pretty much the same as zoom and some of the other online things but in all honesty it's a lot more than just an online meeting place so the idea behind microsoft teams is complete collaboration within your team hence the word teams so what do i mean by collaboration well this can be discussing different projects different documents that you might have and far as far sharing those goes just chatting with each other both company-wide and again within that team environment so a one-to-many kind of setting so what i'd like to do is just kind of jump into the microsoft teams interface uh and kind of show you guys around now i'm gonna be showing it to you on my pc um but there is a client for your mac if you are an apple user uh and also for your mobile devices i know they do it for the apple phones and i believe also for the android phones so this is another nice feature of this not only can you use this and collaborate with your team pc to pc or pc to mac but even on your mobile devices so when you're traveling around in the field you can still get access to all those resources so again let's go ahead and jump into that interface real quick and let's show you guys around okay so here we are in microsoft teams just kind of showing you around the interface we've got a couple of things um up over here we've kind of got our menu to manage your channel get email address get a link to a channel connectors and stuff like that most of the time you're not going to have to worry about this there is a quick meeting so this is our typical online meeting link so you can set up a meet now or schedule a meeting right from within teams up in this upper right hand corner there's also ways to do it directly from within microsoft outlook etc so also in teams and we have this left hand column here and you're going to see activity this is where you might have some mentions replies and other notifications will typically go here [Music] so if you're communicating with your team you're going to see different things start to show up here chat so you can set up a new chat this is just a one-on-one conversation or as you can see a group or even a tag uh of chat so your typical chat network within your business you can use this very simply one-to-one one-to-many lots of times when you're using the one to many of those that's where the teams area really comes into play and you'll want to use it from there from here we have our teams area and as you can see we've got a projects team set up and i'm going to keep moving on down just to kind of go through things a little bit and then we're going to come back to this teams area because this is where we're going to spend most of our time so it has access to your calendar i'm not going to click on that because it's my personal calendar but this will integrate with your office 365 calendar if you're using microsoft 365. calls this is if you're on a higher level of microsoft 365 plan or you've added on the ability to do voice over ip phone calls within microsoft 365 hence within microsoft teams if you don't have that functionality turned on you can't use this calls area files is this going to show you some of your files that you may have uploaded and put on here or have in different areas and of course when you're connected to onedrive it will show you a bunch of different stuff within onedrive just kind of like a normal file and folder and those things can be done within there from in here you can also see some other apps now microsoft has collaborated with a lot of different people on putting in other applications not only stuff from within microsoft ecosystem but from others so we've got the onenote such things from microsoft but if you click on more apps you can actually go out and you will see a whole search and a whole catalog of different apps i mean youtube's even got something in here we've got some different calendar weather power up now a lot of these you have to pay for or work on integration to if you don't already have the products so just be careful adding these because you'll want to make sure you have an official account if it's needed some of these other things you know just just play with it by reading through and seeing what you need and again you can kind of go through here and look for those apps at the very bottom you also have help if you need some help on training and things of that nature so let's go back real quick to the teams area so here we have our team so we have a projects team and then under that team we have two channels we have a general channel and a datto virtualizations channel so what's the difference so the high level team kind of think of it like in your file folder structure if you will that might be your data drive or data volume and then underneath that you're going to have other folders maybe for departments or such so there's different ways of setting this up there's no wrong way but you don't have to set up a bunch of teams by department now you may want to we can set up something for budgets let's say so one way to do budgets if you make create a team that's the high level you still would need a channel underneath that so you may have an administrative or a accounting or whatever budgets [Music] team right and then underneath that you might do a budgets channel so that channel is now specific to working on budgets with underneath accounting now you can either incorporate people from that same team or again go to others another way to think about it you could do a high level budgets team and then give each of the departments their own channel to discuss within themselves if you're a big bigger organization so that when you get into these different channels these are more specific discussions that you're having more specific information so you again you could have a budgets team you could have every year listed under it 2020 2021 2022 2023 so on and so forth and then add people to those channels that you want to have as part of these teams and or channels so it's a way to collaborate so even though multiple people might be part of this projects team in the channels i might only have a subset of those same people plus maybe even some other people as part of this channel and this is where things kind of really get broken down and we can add people again create more conversations channels and have new conversations so new conversations is that chatting that i mentioned so a lot of times again when you're working on something let's just say our budget we're going to be in our budget channel i just want to have a conversation with everybody going what's with what's going on hey are we still on for that meeting tomorrow at such and such i haven't seen the invite and you're going to send a chat message um to everybody via the teams app on that so that they can all be part of that conversation and see things you can upload files to the different areas so you can have files as part of the team and you can have files as part of the different channels so we can upload create new we can sync copy links download add cloud storage all that different stuff you can just drag and drop them here so if you've got your file folder open you again you can drag and drop what's nice with this again is if you're on the road on your laptop on your mobile device and you are working on let's say the budget again you would have access to the files as it relates to what's going on right there so that you could work on it remotely and everyone can see what's going on see that who last modified it the names of the file and all of that so this is the general overview into teams i just want you to start thinking about the fact that teams is not just for doing online video and voice meetings okay so you can use this to do true collaboration with inside your business again you can arrange your teams and channels as you see fit um but they are different a team is different than a channel within a team okay and you can also work with those outside your organization inside your team's environment so there is a free teams client i know they're still offering it for free for now i don't know for how much longer but there is a way again where they can with any office 365 agreement they have office 365 account you can definitely have them be part of your project and your team's area just by inviting them into that area okay so you would add more people and start typing their name or group and add as it says here you can add people outside your organization as guests by typing their email addresses so they'll get an invite so they can participate even if they aren't outside of your organization i hope that helps you understand that teams is more than just for your typical video meetings like zoom and all those other online meeting things it truly can be used within your organization to have better communication within different departments and allow you to more closely collaborate on different things as you move forward it is not for everybody but when your organization demands it you have a lot of things going on this can definitely be a help to your team to use it for more than just those online meetings as always if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to us here at southwest networks 760-770-5200 you