Describe how Microsoft Teams promotes collaboration and enhances teamwork

  • 10 minutes

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app, a place for teamwork. It’s an app for people and teams to come together, stay connected, and get things done, across work, home, school, and on the go. Teams helps you pull together a team and connect with colleagues through real-time messaging and engaging and inclusive meetings. You can use channels to share files and data, manage tasks, and collaborate on documents with people inside and outside your organization. All these features can be done while staying secure and compliant. Make Teams your own by adding notes, websites, and integrating your business processes and workflows with other apps, 3rd party and line of business (LOB) applications.

Teams is built on Microsoft 365 groups, Microsoft Graph, and the same enterprise-level security, compliance, and manageability as the rest of Microsoft 365 and Office 365. Teams uses identities stored in Microsoft Entra ID (formally known as Azure Active Directory or Azure AD). Users can access Teams through their internet browser, or by installing Teams on their computer or mobile device. Teams comes with many features and functionalities to help your organization connect and work together to get things done.

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams is a new AI tool that helps you find information faster and get the most out of your teams chats and meetings. Have more effective meetings by getting a summary of key discussion points and suggested action items, all in real time during a meeting. Catch up on chats by quickly reviewing the main points, action items and decisions. Bring everything together in Teams with Microsoft 365 Chat. Microsoft 365 Chat can find and use info that's buried in documents, presentations, emails, calendar invites, notes, and contacts to help you get your work done. To learn more about Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams, see Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams.

Teams and channels

Organize and collaborate across projects and workloads. Get started by creating a team and/or channel.

  • Teams is a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects, interests or outcomes. It’s designed to bring together a group of people to get things done. Conversations, and resources shared in standard channels will be visible to all the team's members.
    • Teams can be created to be private to only invited users.
    • Teams can also be public and open to anyone within the organization.
    • A team has a limit of up to 10,000 members.
  • Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations and content organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines, or whatever works for your team. Channels are where discussions happen and where the work actually gets done. For instance, users in a team could have a channel with a tab for a specific report that they're all contributing to. Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint.
    • Standard channels are open to all team members.
    • Private channels are for selected team members.
    • Shared channels are for people both inside and outside the team. You can invite anyone to a shared channel, even if they are not part of the team the channel belongs to.

Screenshot showing channels and chat within the Microsoft Teams platform.

Chat and instant messaging

Chat and instant messaging let you work together, without cluttering up your email and keeping it clear for important messages. Instant messaging is ideal if you need to check something with a colleague or ask a quick question. You can also have a group discussion to encourage open conversation and promote thoughtful debate. The following list describes some of the benefits of Teams chat and instant messaging:

  • Instantly connect. Message a team member one on one or the entire team in a group chat. Hop on a call or share your screen for immediate feedback.
  • Take conversations anywhere. Record voice messages while you’re on the go, and reply to an instant chat from your mobile device.
  • Keep the team focused. Organize your conversations, files, and apps in one place to keep the team in sync.
  • Reduce email clutter. Move email threads into quick chats. Share photos and documents with one person or the team.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Teams chats empowers you to ask questions about your chat conversations in Teams. You can use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to quickly review the main points, action items, and decisions from your chats, without having to scroll through long threads. You can also choose to view highlights from the past 1, 7, or 30 days of conversation. Copilot for Microsoft 365 can't reference images, loop components, or files shared in the chat thread.

Support productive conversations through Microsoft Teams

Follow the interactive walkthrough to learn how Teams helps your teams to be more productive and efficient through the chat and instant-messaging features.

You now have a better understanding of how Microsoft Teams can help your team collaborate better through conversations.

Online meetings

Meetings help teams share status updates, brainstorm ideas, and solve issues together. Microsoft Teams is designed to help you have more productive meetings whether that’s collaborating through online meetings, webinars, live events, or audio and video conferencing. Microsoft Teams comes with many different features that can help your team quickly engage and improve how they work together through meetings.

  • Manage all meeting activities in one place. A user's calendar in Teams is connected to their Exchange calendar so when users schedule a meeting in Outlook, their meeting is automatically visible and accessible from Teams and vice versa. Users can also start meetings whenever they want, without scheduling them. Users can join meetings through links, their Teams calendar, or call into meetings using their phones through audio conferencing. Calling or dialing into meetings is useful for users who are on the road or when internet connectivity is limited. Audio conferencing allows up to 1000 phone attendees. Centralize your meeting activities with the Meet app in Teams. Meet helps users prepare for meetings, review past discussions and quickly discover meeting content like chats, files, and agendas. Meet enhances meeting efficiency by simplifying the prep work and reducing time spent revisiting past meetings. Teams Premium includes features like live captions in different languages during meetings and smart summaries after meetings.
  • Conduct different types of meetings. Meetings, webinars, and live events are all types of meetings, but webinars and live events provide extra control for the organizer over the conversation and participants. Teams can detect what's said in a meeting and present real-time captions with speaker attribution. You can blur or use custom backgrounds during video meetings and share your screen or content.
    • Meetings in Teams include audio, video, and screen sharing for up to 1,000 people. View-only capabilities are for participants over 1,000 up to 20,000. Participants don't need to be a member of an organization (or have a Teams account) to join a Teams meeting. They can join directly from the calendar invitation via the "Join meeting" link or call in via audio if available.
    • Webinars are structured meetings where presenters and participants have clear roles, often used for training purposes or sales and marketing lead generation scenarios. Webinars provide two-way interaction. Participants up to 1,000 have fully interactive capabilities.
    • Live events are structured meetings that enable your organization to schedule and produce events that stream to large online audiences, up to 20,000 participants. Live events provide a managed Q&A experience. You can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides, using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Teams meetings enables you to ask any question about the meeting, both in real-time and after the meeting ends. Copilot for Microsoft 365 can help you understand different perspectives by topic or by speaker, identify timeline conflicts, list unresolved questions, and more. You can even ask Copilot for Microsoft 365 to organize your discussion points into a table, generating a markdown table that's ready for you to copy and share. By processing the meeting transcript, it will generate responses to prompts such as “What questions are unresolved in this meeting?”, “What opinions did team members have about this campaign?” or “Create a table of pros and cons for this campaign.”

Screenshot showing an online meeting in action within the Microsoft Teams platform.

Microsoft Teams Phone

Stay connected with voice and video calling using Microsoft Teams Phone on your computer, tablet, mobile device, or desk phone. Teams Phone provides a secure, integrated calling program that unifies classic and modern calling features. You can start a call from chat, contact card, Outlook, or the Calls app, to save time and reduce costs. Teams Phone has updated cloud calling features like voicemail transcription and group call pickup to elevate your experience beyond that of traditional calls. No matter where you choose to work, your calls, voicemail, and call history move with you. Transition calls from your home Wi-Fi to your cellular service while on the go, and then to your office Wi-Fi when you arrive, all from one number using Teams Phone. Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Microsoft Teams Phone will quickly generate summaries of phone conversations, capture action items, and answer your questions about your phone calls. To learn more about Teams Phone, see Phones for Microsoft Teams or MS-721 Plan and design Teams collaboration communications systems - Training | Microsoft Learn

Extend Teams by using collaborative apps

A collaborative app is a solution integrated or built into Teams that enables employees to work better together, using the tools they already know. Microsoft Teams is an extensible platform that you can create custom applications on. Apps for Teams can be as simple or as complex, as you need, from sending notifications to channels or users, to complex multi-surface apps incorporating conversational bots, natural language processing, and embedded web experiences. You can build apps for an individual, your team, your organization, or for all Microsoft Teams users everywhere.

Some of the ways that you can extend Teams using collaborative apps are:

  • Power BI in Teams can empower your organization to collaborate with data to deliver improved outcomes.
  • Power Apps can help you build apps to add directly into Teams by creating a tab.
  • Power Automate can help you automate tasks and processes all within Teams.
  • Dynamics 365 and Teams integration can provide high-level details of your customers to ensure you have helpful context and can be prepared in customer meetings.
  • Power Virtual Agents allows you to create chatbots that can be integrated into Teams.
  • Integrate with third-party partners and services for more capabilities within Teams, like ServiceNow or Salesforce. Integration with third-parties can be done through incoming and outgoing webhooks and connectors.