Yesterday the Office team at Microsoft launched a new chat-based tool “Microsoft Teams” for work colleagues that enables a digital workspace experience tightly integrating with Office 365 apps and services with the portfolio of collaboration applications and services being more richer and varied than ever before with the likes of Office 365 Groups, Yammer and SharePoint. I quite like it and it kind of flows and great to see it as best of breed collaboration app!

Microsoft Teams is built on Office 365 Groups for cross-application membership and backed by Microsoft Graph services to surface recent and relevant information. The focus here is that how teams get to work in real-time through chat (threaded feature-rich conversations), files (from OneDrive and SharePoint team site), notes (from OneNote) and planner (from Microsoft Planner) and calendar (from Exchange Calendar). Microsoft Teams is available in preview and the roll out is expected in the first quarter of calendar year 2017 to all eligible Office 365 customers (Business Essentials, Business Premium, and Enterprise E1, E3 and E5 plans).

To set the clarity when comparing with other collaboration services in Office 365, Microsoft stated the following points:

• “Exchange is the undisputed leader in corporate email and according to Gartner has “80 percent share of companies using cloud email with revenue above $10 billion.”
• SharePoint provides intranets and content management solutions to more than 200,000 organizations and 190 million people.
• Yammer is the social network for work, enabling cross-company discussions for 85 percent of the Fortune 500.
• Skype for Business provides real-time voice, video and conferencing and hosts more than 100 million meetings a month.
• Office 365 Groups is our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another.”

So what are the key features of Microsoft Team?

• Bring your team together – create an open, collaborative workspace for your team. Then use channels to organise conversations by topic, department, project, area, or anything else.
• Chat one to one and with groups – outside of open team conversations, chat privately and share files and notes with anyone in your organisation.
• Make video calls and schedule online meetings – have impromptu or scheduled meetings in any channel, or just call someone…
• Team files, notes, and apps in one place – Your team’s tools are organised and integrated in Microsoft Teams with the power of Office 365.

Screenshots courtesy of Microsoft

For a quick productivity walkthrough tour of Microsoft Teams, check out the link below.
https://statics.teams.microsoft.com/hashedassets/ProductWalkthrough-7b93d5b2.mp4

Enable Microsoft Teams on your Office 365 Tenant

You or your Office 365 Administrator need to turn of few settings as per the screenshot below.
1. Navigate to Admin centre > Services & Add–ins
2. Access “Microsoft Teams”.

Getting started with Microsoft Teams

You can see Microsoft Teams in action and access from one of the following ways:

• “Teams” tile in Office 365 App launcher
• Accessing the web app at https://teams.microsoft.com
• Desktop App (Windows and Mac)
• Mobile App (iOS, Android)

Enjoy the new collaboration app and get things done now!

-Chirag

Published by Chirag Patel @techChirag

Chirag is an independent Microsoft 365 consultant at Patel Consulting, and Microsoft MVP (Office & Apps Services), based in UK with more than 20 years of industry experience. He is also a BCS (British Computer Society) Member & Chartered IT Professional, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and TOGAF9 Certified Architect. He works with a wide variety of clients in many sectors, designing and implementing business collaboration, data and information management solutions and services based on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 technologies, Power Platform to create business value for both themselves and their customers, including UK Microsoft Gold Partners with deployment, upgrade and migration services delivery. Chirag is an active Microsoft 365 community participant, frequent speaker at local and international events including Microsoft 365 Saturdays, Power Saturdays, SharePoint Saturdays, Collab365, TeamsFest, Modern Workplace Summit and Scottish Summit. You can follow Chirag on twitter at @techChirag. View all posts by Chirag Patel @techChirag