This series of posts is going to be on one of our favorite applications from Microsoft, Microsoft Teams. We hope if you don’t feel that way, then at the end of this blog post series you might have a difference in opinion. Therefore, let’s start from the Introduction to MS Teams.
MS Teams – The One-Stop shop
MS Teams is one of the core applications in the O365 suite. This is mainly used for Team Collaboration through IM, calls, meetings and much more.
MS Teams was released in March 2017. It has been 3 years since the launch, and it has become a very mature product. We all know Skype for Business is going to retire. As a result, MS Teams is going to replace it.
Note: If you don’t know this, then it will come as a surprise to you. Skype For Business must be migrated to MS Teams before end of July 2021.
Advantages of MS Teams
- Firstly, it supports the Modern Workplace which is promoted by Microsoft.
- Secondly, it is the best solution for the remote working culture that has evolved in the recent times.
- Thirdly, MS Teams integrates with many other 3rd party solutions like Asana, Trello, JIRA, Azure, SharePoint and the list goes on. This helps users to avoid switching different applications.
- Moreover, MS Teams can be easily extended (customised to support other 3rd party apps built within the company) and the documentation provided by Microsoft supports this immensely.
- Finally, MS Teams has improved its Security features a lot since it was released. Now Teams meet compliance standards including ISO 27001, HIPPA. SOC 2 and the EU Model Clauses. MS Teams supports MFA, Conditional Access, AIP etc. We will find out more about this in-detail in our future blog posts.
Features in MS Teams
- Instant Messaging (IM), Calls and Meetings.
- Fully integrated with O365 – Supports almost all the apps in O365.
- Fantastic UI in both web, desktop as well as the mobile versions.
- Collaboration within Internal employees and with External employees (once allowed by the admin)
- Apps – We must mention about the 3rd party apps support. There are 100s of apps that are currently supported by MS teams in terms of bots, tabs, apps etc. (We will explore these one by one in our next blog post)
- Bots in MS Teams. There are many 3rd party bots (25+) present in MS Teams like Ask bot, Polly bot etc.
- MS Teams is a secure application.
- And this list goes on…
Audience Roles in MS Teams
We are going to categories the MS Teams Audience into four Roles.
- End Users (Team Members)
- Power Users (Team Owners who structure their Teams with bots, new tabs, apps etc. to align well for their Team Members)
- MS Teams Developers (Users who develop custom artifacts and deploy it to the Teams)
- MS Teams Administrators (Users who have total control over the Teams and defines the security and privileges for the Internal and External Users)
So, in future blog posts of this series, we are going to take each Role from the above-mentioned list and explore these roles in more details. So, stay tuned….
For Developer’s and Administrator’s role, we are going to elaborate further with real time examples and code snippets. Also, we will build MS Teams solutions that can be deployed and used across.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for our exciting articles…
