Microsoft Teams Turns One!

Microsoft Teams Turns One!

On March 12, 2018, Microsoft Teams celebrated its one year anniversary and what and eventful first year it was!  According to Microsoft, around 200,000 organizations in 181 markets (in 39 languages) are using teams to date and we can expect it to rise throughout the year with Microsoft’s additional features and updates to Teams this coming year.

Teams for Intelligent Communications and Collaboration

Being part of Office 365, Teams has been able to take advantage of many of its strength by being able to integrate with many other Office 365 applications while also tapping its 120 million user base.  Teams uniquely delivers on its many features, such as chat-based collaboration, meetings, calling (and soon, full enterprise voice features), at scale with enterprise-grade security and compliance standards to make sure that you are within global standards.  However, to improve on their vision for Intelligent Communications within organizations, Microsoft has announced that they will be implementing the following features within this year:

Cloud recording—Will provide one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting. In the future, it will also include facial recognition, so remarks can be attributed to specific meeting attendees.

Inline message translation—People who speak different languages will be able to fluidly communicate with one another by translating posts in channels and chat.

Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices—Will enable you to easily make a call, join a meeting, or add other people to a meeting in Teams using spoken, natural language. This functionality will extend to IP phones and conference room devices.

Background blur on video—The ability to blur your background during video calls will allow other meeting attendees to focus on you, not what’s behind you.

Proximity detection for Teams Meetings—This feature will make it easy for you to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting.

Mobile sharing in meetings—Meeting attendees will be able to share a live video stream, photos, or the screen from their mobile device.

In addition to this, Microsoft will be adding new enterprise-grade calling features in Teams which will include consultative transfer and call delegation and federation.  Another feature that will be introduced is Direct Routing which will allow you to use your existing telephony infrastructure with Teams for calling.  To learn more about this you may read the original article here or you can contact us at 893-9515 to ask us directly!

CT Link Systems, Inc. Adopts Microsoft Teams!

CT Link Systems, Inc. Adopts Microsoft Teams!

Office collaboration is becoming key to success in businesses right now.  Business mobility and workforce communication have become so important that it can lead to you losing a big sale to your competitors.  CT Link Systems, Inc. in an effort to improve their collaboration has decided to adopt Microsoft Teams.  Below are a few functions of Microsoft Teams that we are enjoying and helping us collaborate easier:

Chat

Chatting using Microsoft Teams is an improved experience if you are coming from other Microsoft Instant messengers like Skype for business.  One big difference is that unlike Skype you have an archive for your chat history.  You don’t have to worry that your chat between you and your superiors will disappear, you can always go back and check what was noted and even favorite a message for faster identification.  Files are not immediately deleted as well once your chat is finished, it saves itself on your OneDrive and you will have a tab where all your files from that particular contact will be saved to make it easier for you to find your files!  One feature missing from Teams so far is the capability to do video calls, however Microsoft has stated that they are working on it!

Teams

This is the main feature of Microsoft teams in which you can create a group, which serves as something similar to group chat but with more functions.  Within each group, there are different tabs which have different functions, the default would be the wiki and files.  The wiki tab would be the page where you can place your glossary for the group so that everyone has a reference area during conversations.  The files tab is where you can view all the files shared in the group and even real time edit the file such as word and excel.  You may also place more tabs per group if needed, any app available in Office 365 can be placed on it such as planner (a favorite in our office) to help remember deadlines and keep yourself on track.

These are just examples of ways teams helped our organization, however teams is still constantly being improved for better user experience so keep a watch out for it!  If you’d like to learn more, please visit our Microsoft page or contact us at 893-9515!