Microsoft Teams
The hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365, Teams aggregates many tools onto one platform for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration – allowing you to chat, video conference, or share files all from the same place.
You can use your Teams client to engage with individuals and groups of participants, or create a Team for more focused, long term projects or to host a course
Here’s a very quick and informative 5 minute demonstration of the Teams interface
Microsoft Teams
Creating a Team
Naming your Team: We suggest using an easily identifiable Team name, prefaced with ‘GSD’ like ‘GSD Course 1221 Fall 2020′ or ‘GSD STU1101 Fall 2020.’ This will make it easy for your team members to keep track of their teams.
Adding Owners: If you create your own Team, it would be a good idea to add at least one alternate owner. CRG will not be able to manage your Team directly ourselves, so if changes need to be made – having multiple owners will mitigate any delays if the Team’s creator is not available.
Templates: We typically suggest selecting the Other option rather than choosing one of the predefined templates as these templates tend to lock in settings or features that you may not need or want.
Who has access?
Everyone at the University that has an Office 365 account, this includes all GSD students, staff, and faculty.
You can also collaborate with anyone outside the University by inviting them to your Team as ‘External Collaborators’ and ‘Guests’
How do you get it?
Teams is available across all major platforms and devices. You can choose to use the web client in your preferred browser, or install the desktop client for Mac or PC.
The desktop client now comes with the new version of Office, though you can also download the client directly through the Teams website
You can also use the Teams web client by logging into your Microsoft 365 account and launching the Teams app, or by logging into the Teams website directly: https://teams.microsoft.com
There are also apps available in the Android Play store or Apple’s App store for the iPhone or iPad.
What are the features?
Chat
The most significant feature of Teams is Conversations, its chat component
Similar to Slack, Teams allows you to have threaded, asynchronous chats with any participant.
There are three types of conversations you can have:
- Private Conversations: you can chat directly with individuals or a group of participants without belonging to a Team
- Team Conversations: within a Team, you can create a post visible to all team members, who can then add to the threaded conversation
- Team Private Channel Conversations: within a Team, you can create Private Channels and invite only a subset of Team members to participate; these chats are not visible to all team members
File Sharing and Storage Quotas
There are almost no limitations in terms of type or size of files you can store in Teams, and the quota per Team is high; you should not ever worry about running out of space.
Microsoft Teams stores files using the same technology used by Microsoft OneDrive, which we use for personal file storage.
In fact, you can access your OneDrive from your personal Files section on the left-hand navigation bar.
Teams Personal Files Menu Item
Every time you start a new chat, create a new Team, or add a Channel to a Team – it creates a new Files section specific to that instance, and only people in the conversation have access to those files.
You can access a Team’s files directly in your Teams client, or if you prefer, you can sync the files to your computer and work with them as if they were stored locally, just like in OneDrive
Historically, syncing files to your desktop would mean that you may run out of space quickly. However, with OneDrive’s Files on Demand feature, this should no longer be the case. Files give the appearance that they are stored locally, and you can interact with them just like they were; however, only your most important files are stored locally; the rest are stored in the cloud and do not take up any space on your computer.
Video Conferencing
Video conferencing in Teams is very robust and, though not as fully featured as Zoom, does rival Zoom.
Meetings can be scheduled and guests can send invitations, just like in Zoom, but the real power of Teams video calls is the ability to start ad-hoc meetings with one click, either within a chat or within a Team via the Meet Now button. Using Meet Now, every member of the Team or Channel will automatically be notified that you would like to have a meeting.
Click Meet Now to start a Team meeting
Live Events is the Team’s webinar feature that is available to everyone.
Apps
You can add apps to your Teams client for your personal use or add them to one of your Teams
Apps are a way to extend the functionality of Teams by integrating other services
They can either be other Microsoft 365 apps or 3rd party apps like Zoom or Miro
A list of available Teams Apps
Any Microsoft 365 apps should be included with our subscription and are automatically available to add to Teams.