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Issue No. 92April 2020

Some Tips for Microsoft Teams

Given the current climate, and with many of us working from home, we have received a lot more questions from our clients and partners around Microsoft Teams.  Below are a few tips for working with Microsoft Teams. Hang in there and be safe!

Microsoft Teams Tips:

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 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.  Private Channels
This feature allows users to create new channels within Microsoft Teams that already exist, but can choose to allow access to only members selected by private channel creator. Great use of the private channel would be to limit collaboration to users who have a need to know. This will allow facilitating communication between certain assigned people without creating a brand new team. Lock icons will indicate if a channel is private or not, and members of the private channel will only be able to see who and partake in conversations within that channel.
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 depend 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 apps for on-the-go messaging.

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. 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. 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 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.
Source:  MessageOps

 

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