One App to Rule Them All – Developments of Microsoft Teams

In the past few years, workplaces have become increasingly acquainted with collaboration and communication platforms. Accelerating a pre-existing trend towards remote working, the arrival of the covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 saw businesses rush to adopt such platforms in an effort stay operational under lockdowns.?

Since 2020, Microsoft Teams has emerged from being a new challenger in the market, to become something of a household name in the workplace collaboration space, and is now the pre-eminent tool for businesses looking to equip remote and flexible workforces.?Launched in 2017, as a successor that elevates far beyond Microsoft’s “Skype for Business” application; Teams took the video conferencing framework from Skype and added a host of new features and deeper integrations, resulting in a more capable and feature-rich collaboration platform.?

Teams is now in its fifth year, and with over 270 million regular users, most of us are at least familiar with the fundamental components of the platform – chat and video conferencing.?So in this article, we’ll bypass the basics and dig a little deeper into the numerous features and intricacies of the platform to help you unearth some of its less obvious functionality and more recent additions.

App integrations

You’ll probably be aware that Teams allows you to integrate your favourite Microsoft and third-party apps into its interface. What’s less obvious though is how best to integrate these apps into your team pages.?

1. Apps added to the sidebar are there to personalise your own teams interface. These don’t appear for other team members.

2. Apps added as a tab to a channel are displayed to all team members. Here you might want to add workflow management tools such as planner or Trello, or pin a SharePoint document library for easy access.

3. Apps can even be pinned under the chat window. These are also available to your entire team and can be used to extend app functionality into the chat stream. Used in this setting, the Wikipedia app for example allows team members to search the site and link articles in the chat space.

By now you may be asking: “what are some of the most useful apps to integrate into Teams?”

Power BI

Power BI takes raw business data and converts it into easy-to-interpret visualisations. By incorporating power BI into a Team page you can position relevant data at the heart of your team’s discussions. Using pre-built “connectors,” power BI extracts data from the likes of databases, websites and spreadsheets, rationalises this data and then position it where it’s most useful to your team.

Forms

Brilliantly simple and intuitive, Forms is an extremely useful survey generation tool that lets you launch surveys, polls and questionnaires that are relevant to your projects or business departments. Teams lets you attach the Forms app as a channel tab, but for more spontaneous quick-polls you can launch questions into your group chats using the “@Forms” prompt. Doing so presents questions in the chat stream as shown below.

Microsoft Lists

The “Lists” app is a relative newcomer to the Microsoft 365 scene, and acts as an intuitive data management and tracking tool – think Excel but more visually enticing and user-friendly. Lists can be used to perform all sorts of data tracking purposes; from inventory management and event planning to issue resolution and everything in between. The lists app can be pinned to the top of a Teams page or channel, merging project-relevant data with your team’s shared collaboration space. Lists comes pre-loaded with a number of templates to make getting started as easy as possible.

Meeting Features

With a constantly evolving range of in-meeting features and the ability to accommodate up to 1000 interactive attendees, the Teams meeting experience has never been better. There’s a good chance you’ve taken part in a Teams meeting already, so let’s skip the basics and look at some of the lesser-known features and capabilities.

Meetings can be launched in various ways

Scheduling via the Outlook calendar remains one of the most popular ways to schedule Teams meetings, giving the ability to schedule meetings around your own personal engagements. Meetings can also be arranged inside Teams of course, using the calendar app. From here you can pencil in a meeting for a future time or launch an urgent meeting using the “meet now” button, a feature which lets you add attendees with the meeting already underway.?The calendar app includes an invaluable feature called “scheduling assistant,” that helps you schedule meetings around any prior commitments your attendees have.

Breakout rooms

Teams now lets you divide large meetings into separate, smaller gatherings known as “breakout rooms.”?Ideal for more focused group discussions, breakout rooms can be used to give small groups a preparatory space before they contribute to the main discussion. Alternatively you might want to fragment your entire meeting into smaller groups before regrouping again; this handy feature can be used as you wish.

Live Transcription

Teams offers real-time meeting transcription in 28 languages, to help attendees follow along. In a fast-moving meeting featuring a large number of attendees, it can sometimes be hard to keep up. The transcript sidebar sits alongside the main meeting pane, so you team can read what was said, and by whom, in real-time.

Together Mode

This quirky feature takes your meeting attendees, and using AI, superimposes them onto a virtual background to create an illusion of togetherness.?Background options include cafes, lecture theatres, amphitheatres and even conference rooms.?

Hidden Chat Features

As a cornerstone of the Teams experience, you may think you’re familiar with its intuitive chat interface. However, lurking below the surface are a number of nifty features that are easy to miss.

@mentions

One of the most basic but useful of Teams’ chat features are “@mentions.”?Sometimes a message is only applicable to one or two people in a team, so you only want to grab the attention of those individuals. “@mentions” act as tags, and send a notification to the relevant people, drawing their attention to your post in the group chat. To use one, simply type the “@” symbol into the chat window in a channel, and teams will display a list of the team members you might want to notify.

Bring important chats to the fore

Need the ability to closely monitor a specific chat centred around a pressing issue? Teams offers various ways to bring those critical conversations front and centre, so you can stay on top of events.

Filter Messages

You’re probably already aware that Teams lets you search for messages using keywords, via the search bar at the top of the window.??Sometimes though, this doesn’t help you home in on that elusive message you’re struggling to locate.?Thankfully, the filter feature can be used to apply further search parameters to help you find what you’re looking for.?

Using the search bar use any key words you can think of that will help identify the message you’re seeking. If that doesn’t work, click on the message tab at the top of your search results and apply filters as shown below.

Focus in on messages from specific teams or channels, those sent between certain dates, messages that contain attachments and those in which you’ve been tagged (@ mentioned).

Filters can also be applied through the chat and teams panels.?In the chat panel for example,?you can sift through all your chats by searching by chat name or using the “unread, ”meetings” and “muted” filters.

Microsoft Teams Phone

It goes without saying that Teams offers a great way for remote workforces to stay connected, but it’s less well known that the platform can also perform as a PBX phone system.?Microsoft Teams Phone blends telephony and collaboration into a single interface, unifying communications into a single slick, intuitive portal.

Teams Phone is available to most Teams customers at a modest additional charge and is included in the Microsoft 365 E5 plan. Offering the usual VoIP benefits plus the added luxury of seamless integration with your Microsoft 365 environment, Teams Phone offers an all-in-one communication solution tailored to the needs of agile, flexible modern workforces.

Make outside parties feel involved

Teams lets you launch group calls from within chats or channels. Include partners, vendors, associates and suppliers like never before with collaborative video calls that make them feel like part of your team.

Handle call traffic with call-centre grade features

The auto attendant and call queue features are invaluable tools for handling high call volumes and making sure inbound callers are directed to the right person every time. The “call park” feature lets you put a call on hold and retrieve it using another device; ideal for when your phone battery is running low.

Call from any device, anywhere, any time!

Teams phone can be accessed through any Teams-enabled device; including PCs, tablets and mobile phones. You can enhance the calling experience further with feature-laden desktop phones incorporating video capabilities and unified communications. Or, why not invest in a speakerphone and bring outside callers into your meetings?

Leverage a single contact number and transfer calls with ease!

Teams phone makes your entire organisation contactable using a single contact number. It takes the functionality of a traditional private branch exchange and eliminates the costly physical infrastructure element; call-routing and features are all hosted and managed remotely in cloud data centres. It really is an effortless plug-and-play experience, all your team needs are internet-enabled devices and you’ll be able to route incoming calls to them no matter where they’re working from.?

Count on Centrality to be your Microsoft Expert

If you are looking to harness the complete capabilities of the Microsoft 365 suite, to empower your teams and delivery new levels of organisation productivity, we are here to help. With over 26 years of Microsoft experience, we are best placed to guide, support, and help you to leverage the full capabilities of both the Microsoft 365 suite of products, and the wider Microsoft Cloud, to provide you with the best end user experience that is seamless and secure.

Get in touch today?if you need help to maximise the power and capability of Microsoft 365 in your organisation.