Mastering Microsoft 365: How to Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Hundreds of you have attended our training webinars, and hundreds more have watched the recordings and read articles, but there’s a significant amount of information to take in, and not everyone will have the same learning preferences. If you missed the live webinars, you can attend one of those offered this spring. We have a 2-week schedule posted and intend to add sessions in the future, as well as recordings of these sessions.

We are migrating BuckeyeBox files to OneDrive, but Teams is another tool in the Office 365 suite that is great for collaboration. This article covers some questions we are hearing about Microsoft Teams. In addition, Microsoft has a Teams Quick Start guide that shows you were everything is located. Alternatively, you can watch this video to learn more about Teams.

Why Use Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams allows individual teams to self-organize and collaborate. You can make a Team private, sharing chat and files to only invited users. Teams allows you to share assets like calendars, files and email, too. Some teams may be short-term, bringing a Team together for a specific project and closing the Team when the project is over. You also may set up Teams long-term, to enable members of an established workgroup to chat and share information and files.

What are Channels for in Microsoft Teams?

If a project is complex, with several different work streams, it may be helpful to set up a “channel” for each aspect of the Team. Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, and file separation. When you open a Team, you will see channels listed in the right-side pane. Most channels are available to everyone in the team, but you can make a channel private, so not everyone in the Team has access to it. Files that you save in that channel are also only available to people who have access to the channel.

Channels are most valuable when extended with apps that include tabs, connectors, and bots that increase their value to the members of the team. To learn more, see Apps, bots, & connectors in Teams.

Visit ours site about Teams (https://admin.resources.osu.edu/office-365/teams) Microsoft’s support site for more information about Teams and channels.

Who sets Team membership?

Anyone in the organization can create a Team. Open Microsoft Teams, click “Team” in the menu on the right and then the “Join or Create a Team” button in the upper left corner. When you create the team, you are the owner, and you can choose the type of Team and who has access. Take a look on the job aids provided for using Microsoft Teams that are posted in our Administrative Resource Center. It’s easy to add people within Ohio State to your team based on name.#. However, you can also add guests and people outside the organization to your Team.

There are two main roles in Microsoft Teams:

• Team owner - Creates the team, invites members and can make another user a co-owner. Multiple team owners lets you share the responsibilities of managing the team. Team owners can give users the ability to add a team picture, set permissions across team members to enable them to create standard and private channels, tabs and connectors.
• Team members - The people who the owners invite to join their team.

Teams provides a streamlined collaboration and communication process that allows everyone you need to collaborate to share work of any kind, whenever and wherever they are.