Microsoft Teams is an incredibly powerful tool that most users never use to its full potential. At eData Support we have helped many of our clients utilize teams and at first most think of the application as just an instant messaging platform. Once we open their eyes to some of the capabilities of the program as a unified collaboration platform their efficiency increases tremendously. Here are three tips for getting started with using Teams the way it is meant to be used. These tips are just the tip of the iceberg of what Teams can do but this should get the gears turning on how to leverage all that Teams can do to make your users more effective.
1. Utilize Integrations
Teams has a plethora of different integrations that can maximize efficiency in your workflow. Some of our favorites include Tasks by MS Planner to assign tasks for user on project teams, Polly to do polls and survey opinions, and Wiki to create a knowledge base for our engineering team to reference. There are dozens of third-party integrations that users can take advantage of.
2. Teams are not for just teams
What I mean by this is that for instance you can create a team inside MS Teams for things other than a set of people. I currently have teams for different groups within our organization (ie Management, Accounting, etc) but also for ongoing projects. This meant that all people can be members of the project make sharing files and communication vastly more organized.
3. Use # and @
Utilizing hashtags and @ messages has been a major upgrade to efficiency. Hashtags allow things to be searched for much more efficiently. Whenever I put a piece of information in a conversation post on a channel in teams that I may want to access later, I will add the # character in front of the client name or another keyword to make it much easier to find later. I will also use @ to tag a person in a post in a thread this way it will send that person a notification and ensure they will see the post. Otherwise they will have to rely on going to the channel and seeing it manually.
If you are interested in learning more about how eData can help your company increase communication effectiveness. Please reach out to us at [email protected].