If you’re one of the thousands of organizations that have recently joined Microsoft Teams, welcome to the club! Now that you have a shared space for all of your communication and collaboration, let’s talk about some easy ways to get started so you can make the most of Teams and keep everyone engaged.
Download the App
You’ve probably already downloaded Microsoft Teams onto your computer, but make sure you don’t forget about your mobile devices! Whether you’re a tablet addict or permanently attached to your cell phone, make sure you download Teams on all of your devices.
By enabling the application onto all of your devices, you can make sure that you’ll stay connected, no matter what. Laptop died and you left your charger at home? No problem, just use your cell phone. Cracked your iPhone screen? No worries, you can still call your colleagues from your laptop. Nothing can stop you now!
Kick Off a Group Chat
With agile practices becoming ever more mainstream, staying connected and up-to-date with your colleagues has never been more important — or easier. Chatting with coworkers is a great way to communicate in real-time, even if you’re not working in the same location.
Keep track of ongoing conversations with teammates through one-on-one chats. And if you’re working in a cross-functional group, creating a group chat takes no time at all. Give it a fun name and favorite the chat for easy reference later.
Get Connected
If you use Trello for project management or spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter these days (who doesn’t?), we’ve got great news. You can actually share content from these services (and many others) directly onto Teams by setting up connectors. Not only will rich content be pushed automatically, but you’ll get notified of any team activity in that service.
You can also integrate your favorite apps (anything from Microsoft 365, or external services like SurveyMonkey or HootSuite) within your chats and meetings. You won’t ever have to toggle between applications again, because it’s all at your fingertips within Microsoft Teams.
Start Customizing
Create even larger teams that have dedicated channels for all kinds of things (projects, topics, disciplines, etc.) and then work to make the spaces as convenient as possible. You can upload shared files and pin the resources most frequently used so that it’s easy for everyone to reference.
And you’re not restricted to documents and files either! You can actually pin websites as well, so you can all stay on top of news, performance and metric tracking and live monitoring. It’s all about access. Give your teams what they need, and watch them perform like never before.
Get Active
Microsoft Teams is only as valuable as its frequency of use. If you’re not using the tool, it can’t help you advance your mission. So get involved and participate! Create teams, chat with others and collaborate on team documents in real-time.
And don’t forget to update your profile. Just click on the profile picture in the bottom corner of the app to upload a picture and set a status. No one wants to converse with a faceless user. You have the power to foster engagement. So get to it!
Order Pizza
Yes, you read that right. Adopting a new platform calls for a celebratory luncheon, so call your local pizza joint. And guess what. You can use Microsoft Teams to do that too — all you need is a connection to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). And that’s what you get with Direct Routing.
Microsoft Teams is incredibly functional on its own. But it doesn’t come out of the box with PSTN calling capabilities, meaning you’re still going to be reliant on your cell phone to make professional calls if you’re working remote, or that clunky old deskphone if you’re at the office.
You didn’t adopt Teams to make a partial transition, did you? No! You want all of your communication capabilities to be on one, single application. Let’s make it happen. You can learn more about Direct Routing and how it can radically transform your communication experience on Microsoft Teams by downloading our Complete Guide.
