Teams: Why you need another comms channel

Microsoft Teams has been a HUGE success in terms of adoption numbers. I mean HUGE.

What seems to be missing is the adoption of functionality. Here's a few things you can do easily with Teams, right now, with any Office 365 licence:

File Sharing

Any file you attach and send to a group will automatically be stored and indexed in the related SharePoint site. That has a few benefits - no more emailing attachments around; find your files using SharePoint's search capability (and they'll appear in Delve too!); you can have a chat window open with the document, enabling authors to collaborate in real time.

The files section in Teams can see everything in OneDrive and all your SharePoint sites, as well as anything shared with you. That's a very easy way to search for files if you don't know where they are.

Private Channels

This is new to this autumn, and might not have got to you yet, but it's coming. You can now add private channels within a group, so for example if you've got a group which is focused on a project, but you want only the senior team to see the financial conversation you can do that now - just create a private channel for them.

Who

This is a default bot that you can switch on the Apps settings. It's incredibly useful. Just ask it a natural language question and it will go and find the answer. For example, "What's Nick Ellis's title?" will (if you work for Select Technology) show a card with my details, and three buttons to see my manager, my peers and the people I interact with most often.

In other tabs, Who will show you your organisation chart and information about the people attending your upcoming meetings. Incredibly handy, especially for a new starter.

Incoming Webhooks

A bit more techie this one, but worth talking about. Essentially, you can program any application to send notifications straight into Teams. Perhaps you have a Leave Booking System - you can have it notify you whenever your team request leave. Or a financial app could remind you in Teams when you need to pay an invoice. Or... well, anything really. Very handy.

Flow / Power Automate

Microsoft recently changed Flow's name to Power Automate. It still does the things it always did though, and that includes a lot of automation within Office 365 to bring things to Teams. New document in a SharePoint folder? Or a change to a spreadsheet? How about emails in a shared mailbox that doesn't get much traffic?

Or going the other way, you can use hashtags to trigger events. Maybe you enter "@steve Finish washing the dishes #newtask". Flow can pick that up and create a task for Steve in Planner titled Finish washing the dishes. Since Teams is open all the time, that's a few clicks rather than loading a whole app. Or maybe you want to get a text if you are mentioned in a particular channel?

Basically, it's a very powerful tool and - like a lot of Office 365 - it can be a bit underused. Play with it. There's bound to be something useful for you that you didn't know was there!