Here are some useful tips that can help you get the most out of Microsoft Teams and your Office 365 investment.

Are you and your organization using Teams for collaboration, communication, socializing? With the sharp rise in the numbers of people using Microsoft Teams over the last 2 weeks, I’ve created this tips and tricks guide. I hope this helps you all and if you think of any other must share tips please add them to the comments and the best ones, we will add to the blog post. 

1. Title your chat exchanges.

Channels typically contain numerous conversations. To help a particular chat stand out and make it more searchable, Give it a little title. For example, if you’re chatting with someone from marketing about a new social media campaign, call the chat “Facebook push with marketing,” and those keywords will pop up when you do a search later on. To name a chat, just click the pencil on the top next to the member names and type the title you want.

2. Using SharePoint to store and share files.

Many enterprises rely on SharePoint as secure file storage and collaboration platform. The good news is it’s highly integrated into Teams. In every channel, you can click the Files tab to share files with team members via SharePoint or access SharePoint files already shared to the channel. Team members can collaborate on files shared to a channel using Office Online or an Office desktop app.

3. You can Forward emails into a channel.

Although some tiny startups skip email and use chat exclusively, Microsoft is well aware of how much most of us in the corporate world depends on email. Fortunately, you can forward any email message to a channel from Outlook.

Just click the ellipsis next to any channel name and select “Get email address.” That generates an email address for the channel. Copy it, and you can use that address to forward Word docs, messages, or just about anything you want to add to the channel. It’s a nifty workaround.

4. Use the mobile app for on-the-go messaging. (Only If you need to go out!)

It might not be obvious to many Teams users, but there are mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile. The apps keep things simple, emphasizing team chats and channels without a lot of extra layers and features. Teams also run as a web app or a desktop client for Windows or Mac — which means you have a lot of options.

5. Integrate with Microsoft Planner for simple task management.

One perk Teams offers versus Slack and other competitors is that you can use Microsoft apps like Planner inside Teams (Slack offers thousands of integrations as well, but every Microsoft app is available to integrate from the get-go in Teams.)

Planner, a task-management tool for small teams, is not exactly robust, but it’s a good way to track tasks and then reference them in Teams without a lot of fuss — plus you won’t need a third-party task manager. You can also “pin” the Planner app to any channel to make it more accessible in one click. If you do, Planner shows up as a tab at the top of the channel. Click the plus sign to add a task.

6. Invite others into the fold.

Microsoft Teams is far-reaching right out of the box. You’re not limited to chatting with people in your own team; you can provide guest access to anyone at your company with an Outlook account so you can chat, share documents and more. (Try it — you can search on the name of anyone at your company to find them and start chatting.)

7. Create your own GIFs.

Sprinkling animated GIFs into chats can be motivational for your team, especially for younger workers. A cat leaning back to relax or someone tipping their hat as a thank you can stand out and send just the right message.

You can pick from the animated GIFs included with Teams or use the Giphy app to create your own, which adds an extra layer of personalization to the team chat. Note that although Giphy is built into Teams, the Teams administrator needs to activate it.

8. Use Keyboard shortcuts.

Did you know you can simply press the R key on your keyboard to reply to a thread in the Teams app? Or press Alt-A in Windows (Option-A on a Mac) to quickly attach a file to a message? See all the keyboard shortcuts available in Teams by pressing Ctrl+E to go to the Search field, type /keys, and then press Enter in Windows. Or press Command+E to move the focus to the search field at the top of the screen, type /keys, and press Return on a Mac.

9. Apps and actions from the command box.

The search bar at the top is hiding more than just search functionality, it has some great ‘shortcut’ app and command options, some of which are really useful… A great shortcut key to get to the bar is ALT+E

All you have to do to see what’s on offer is type ‘/’ for the commands, most work standalone and some that work with apps or ‘@’ to see the Apps commands. The apps will require installing and setup on first use, but it’s very quick to do.

Once the apps are installed they can also be accessed by clicking on the ‘…’ at the bottom of the conversation window. This allows you to share the search result, or item from the relevant app in the conversation, this can be a very powerful way to interact with Apps and your teams.

Heres some of my favourite.

• /whatsnew – This has to be the most useful one given the speed that MS release changes these days. This takes you to the Release notes tab in the T-Bot channel. Worth a regular check.
• @Wikipedia – Allows you to do a Wikipedia search. Returns a summary that you can click on to go to the full Wikipedia page.
• /goto – If you have a lot of teams or channels or spend a lot of time, as I do, in the Chat part of teams then this is a good way to hop straight to your destination.
• /files – Shows your recent files and allows you to search and go to the file you want rather than having to click around your teams.
• /keys – This is a shortcut to show shortcuts. Nice quick reference for the MS Teams Keyboard Shortcuts
• /call – This allows you to type the first few letters of the person you want to call and select them to call. In big organisations, this could be very time saving
• /help – Pretty self-explanatory and simple. A really good quick way to ask a question of the Teams help via the T-Bot
• /saved – This takes you straight to your list of saved messages.

10. Microsoft Team T-Bot

The T-Bot is the resident Microsoft Teams Bot and is actually quite a good means of figuring out how to get things done and what is possible. I have been using Teams for months now and I still pop the odd question to the T-Bot.

The really cool thing is that the T-Bot will learn over time, meaning it will get better at answering your questions as time goes on.

So whilst T-Bot is fundamentally the interface to the Teams help, it provides a glimpse and probably everyone's first experience of what is a much wider subject, Bots In Microsoft Teams. There are already many Bot options to choose from in the ‘Store’ from task management, productivity and HR Bots, have a look and see if any can help you. Additionally, you can also build your own Bots.

11. Translation of Teams Message

You can now translate messages to your base language in Microsoft Teams on a message by message basis. In this example, the original message is in French.

Simply click the ‘…’ and choose ‘Translate’

Et Voila – (Sorry couldn’t resist)

You can set it back to show the original language via the same menu. A great feature I think you will agree?

12. Record your Teams meetings

You can record your Microsoft Teams meetings. The recording captures Audio, Video, and any screen sharing activities. The meeting is recorded in the cloud and saved to Stream , meaning you can manage, download, and share along with all your organisations other Video content.

At the most basic level, this allows you to have a record of what was discussed either to go back to or share with team members that could not attend. However, this can be used to easily create a company or department announcements, management team updates, news items, demos, solutions to commons problems or any other communications you might use video for in your organisation.

So how do we do it?…well it couldn't be simpler, once in the meeting just click the ‘…’ and click ‘Start Recording’ like this:

Once clicked you will be told you are recording in a message at the top of the meeting. Once finished you simply click stop recording from the same menu.

The video is saved to Stream, however, you will also see a link to it in the meeting chat window, and be emailed a link to it from Stream. Obviously, as with all your Stream video content, it does take up space so you need to ensure this use of Stream is included in your storage planning.

13. Microsoft Immersive reader for Teams messages

This functionality has been around in other Microsoft Tech for a little while and is predominantly a tool in the Microsoft Education space, that is aimed at schools, colleges and teaches billed as a learning and accessibility tool. However, it can, of course, be useful to a much wider audience than just schools, especially now that it is available in Microsoft teams. So how do you use it and what can it do?

Firstly to access on a given message you use the 3 dots ‘…’ and select it from the drop-down

It can read the text aloud, at different speeds. It can show in larger font size with different colours and spacing. It can show syllables, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and sub-clauses all in different colours and even with labels.

14. Background Blur

One of the features announced at Ignite 2018 is background blur. This is really useful functionality if you work in a busy office, have confidential information on your walls, or, like more and more people do in the modern age you work from home and have the risk of family life crossing over to work-life in the background of your video calls.

To activate Background Blur during meetings simply click on the More actions  ‘…’ 3 dots on the call menu and select ‘Blur My Background’.

You may need to log out and log back in for the functionality to be enabled, however, it is only compatible with certain PC specs at the moment so if it is not available in the menu then you may not be able to use the functionality.

15. Tabs

So a must for productivity and ease of access within your working group is taking advantage of the tabs within your Teams and Channels. Simply exposing a website or file to be easily accessible through to more complex Apps to manage work and help with day to day activities.

All you need to do to add a tab is click the ‘+’ sign on the right-hand side of your Channel and then search for what it is you want to add in, the main MS Apps or at the top with the remainder lower down.:

There are too many to mention them all, however here are some of the ways I have found tabs useful in Teams:

• Simply Exposing Office documents or Websites on a tab for quick reference – I have found this useful in a number of scenarios from quick access to templates through to tracking spreadsheets of various kinds.
• OneNote – for those that love OneNote you can create a OneNote tab and off you go using OneNote within your Channel. 
• Forms – Simply select ‘Forms’ and you can easily create a very powerful form/survey that can be managed in teams and with a tweak of the share permissions shared and filled in by anyone that has the link. The responses can be seen on the tab by the form owner and also stored in a spreadsheet in the files tab.
• Expose any existing SharePoint Document Library – Simply select the ‘SharePoint’ icon fill in site URL, select the document library you want from the list, give the tab a name, and you have the library exposed in a Teams channel.

That is just a few of the tabs we have found useful, however, you only have to look at the number of Apps in the store to know there are going to be tools of all shapes and sizes, have a look around.

That’s all folks, I hope you found this useful and don’t forget if you think of any other must share tips please add them to the comments and we will add the best ones to the blog