An Introduction to Microsoft Teams 

If you haven’t rolled out teams yet to your staff, Microsoft has a “freemium” version available (limited to chat, audio/video calling, and storage caps).  Microsoft is also providing the premium version of teams free for 6 months, outlined here.   

If you’re new or unfamiliar with Teams, here’s some of the features:  

• Chat: Through the chat feature, instantly communicate with other employees. Keep it light or strictly to work, this real time conversational feature works best for quick updates to ongoing projects, or sharing content, files and even fun personalized gifs. 
• Calendar & Meetings: By creating “Team Meetings” allow for remote access via video or phone. Simply dialing into the teams meeting on your device will give you access to any files, screens or chats being shared during the meeting. In the Teams meeting, you can participate. 

• File Share: Open, edit and create all without leaving the app. With Microsoft Teams, it works hand in hand with other Office products including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Giving your team the ability to collaborate and edit documents in real time. 
• Whiteboard: A digital canvas that allows you to write and share ideas in real time. All whiteboards are saved post-meeting and available to the meeting members. 

Teams architecture - Microsoft’s definition of Teams architecture: 

Teams is built on Office 365 groups, Microsoft Graph, and the same enterprise-level security, compliance, and manageability as the rest of Office 365. Teams leverages identities stored in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Teams keeps working even when you're offline or experiencing spotty network conditions. 

To see where Teams fits in the context of Microsoft 365, check out this architecture poster: Teams as part of Microsoft 365. 

When you create a team, here's what gets created: 

• A new Office 365 group 
• A SharePoint Online site and document library to store team files 
• An Exchange Online shared mailbox and calendar 
• A OneNote notebook 
• Ties into other Office 365 apps such as Planner and Power BI 

Teams Overview

User adoption 

It’s important to introduce Teams to your users and demonstrate its value to your organization.  Users are likely to be interested in personalizing the view of their application, notifications, how Teams can improve their work, etc.   

It’s recommended to put together a formal User adoption plan and communicate it throughout the organization.  This plan should provide general awareness, training & a support plan for users.  

Are you planning to deploy, or have you already deployed Teams? 

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