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San Diego Computer Consulting can help you with an Office 365 Teams implementation. Teams is collaboration software that is built into the Office 365 office suite and comes with Business Premium.  We at SDCC use Microsoft Teams throughout the entire business day.

Teams collaboration software is designed to help your staff electronically group together to coordinate on projects, topics, online meetings, and other topic categories. Teams is much like Skype and Zoom. But instead of the chat being the primary focus of general conversation, Teams establishes the topic category as the primary focus.
By having the topic category be the primary focus, staff in your company can be grouped to work with other peers collaboratively via remote connection. The category becomes the focus of the group/team and then allows for everyone in the group to work back and forth to reach a goal.

Teams is very popular, and heavily used during times of remote connectivity – especially with large companies. Teams allows each topic category to become a workflow of ideas, concepts, information, and charting all in one place so that everyone has easy project access.

Teams is integrated into software in an interesting way. Instead of being a normal program like Word, Excel, or others, Teams is more of a “Shell” (to use an old phrase) on your desktop.

Microsoft has designed Teams so that it is the main interface to much of your daily business when it comes to working with a category/project. It is designed so that it launches automatically with your login of Windows.

Upon auto-launch, it puts you in your work category and gives you full access to your peers, files, calendars, and other items all related to that category.

The Teams “Shell” interface gives you quick access to files, calendar, peer chats, and other collaboration tools so that you can get to information quickly without searching through files, folders, emails, etc. Teams is designed much like a library with wings. Each wing of the library is setup for different expertise on different subjects.

Skype and Zoom are great video conferencing and chatting tools. Individuals can share presentations, chat, and conduct easy video conferences. Teams has taken its Skype platform and added many robust features that allows people who are not physically together to operate seamlessly together.

Teams integrates natively with Microsoft Outlook.  When making an appointment, you can add a Teams meeting with 1 Click.   

The Teams interface allows for users to get information about company categories on any topic listed. With the Teams flow, even a new staffmember can easily look up information and begin working on a project immediately. The Teams workflow allows company personnel to review a topic category that is posted and learn about the topic and immediately add collaborative work, ideas, and files for that subject matter. Teams works very similar to a document management system. Keywords and topics can be searched.

Company Files Integration.

Teams is powerful, because not only does the topic category allows for groups of peers to chat and coordinate on a subject, but it also allows for that group to access group-related files on SharePoint. For instance, if you have a Team category called ‘Sales’ you can assign a specific set of directories and files to that Team. Those files are located on the SharePoint server and can be opened and modified. When files are changed on the Team/Category SharePoint site, those files/folders are updated with those changes on your workstation, tablet, and smartphone.

Teams is a big change from working individually on files through a computer and a mapped drive. Teams collaboration is designed so that all work in a topic or category is done so within Teams.

When it comes to workstream collaboration applications, shared calendars are a priority. Organizations need to know who is doing what, when, and where to effectively schedule meetings in order to meet deadlines. This is particularly the case when remote office activities are being used. Microsoft Teams makes it easy: To create or schedule a meeting, click the in-chat “Schedule a Meeting” option or head to the “Meetings” tab. Then, select your preferred meeting channel and choose who you’d like to invite. Need help making sure everyone is available? Use the Scheduling Assistant to find the right time.

Teams has an excellent phone integration component much like Skype. This service is free and uses VoIP telephony. Calls within the Teams groups are free. Calls can be via voice or video. If you want to call an outside number, then you will need a plan from Microsoft/Skype. Their plans are very inexpensive. With Teams, you can make a conference call within the Teams application without using a 3rd party to make that call. This ability is available in Skype and has been integrated in Teams.

With Teams, you can open files in a collaborative mode and Word, Excel, PDF’s and other applications/files can be opened within Teams. The files are located on a SharePoint backend. Therefore, files can be worked on in a collaborative mode. For example, if an Excel spreadsheet is opened, it can be edited by multiple people at the same time. When the file is saved, it is done so on the SharePoint system. The file and changes are all tracked by date and can be reviewed. This versioning keeps a history log of each file and its changes in SharePoint.