What is Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams Features

While many people are familiar with Microsoft Teams, they might think that it is only used for video conferencing. While that is Teams’ specialty, the software can offer so much more to help organizations stay on the same page, share information, and collaborate without having to constantly switch applications. Here are some of Microsoft Teams’ highlights in terms of features.

Online Meetings

Let’s start with the bread and butter of Microsoft Teams and why so many people use the app: to hold online meetings. No matter where your team members are located, you can meet virtually to share progress, ideas, and more using Microsoft Teams. The software has the capability to host interactive meetings for up to 1,000 participants. And, if project managers wish to broadcast a webinar, Teams will allow them to entertain up to 10,000 participants.

Some video conferencing features in Microsoft Teams that can bring your developer team, stakeholders, and outsiders closer include:

• Video preview to ensure that everything looks as it should before going live
• The ability to record meetings for future reference and share them with others
• Meeting chats that can be held before, during, or after web conferences
• Live captions for 40 spoken languages
• Custom backgrounds and the ability to blur your background to minimize distraction
• A raise hand button to ask questions or speak during a meeting without interrupting anyone
• A speaker coach that tells you when to check in with your audience, when you’ve interrupted someone, and when to change pace
• A downloadable attendee list that you can use for future reference or follow-up
• Options to mute background noise, designate speakers, and remove uninvited attendees
• Audio conferencing as a backup for when Wi-Fi is too slow for a proper video broadcast
• Dark mode to minimize eye strain
• Screen sharing
• Whiteboard to brainstorm and share ideas
• Together Mode that helps you see who’s speaking as you pick up on non-verbal cues

While all of these video conferencing features are great, the ease with which you can join a meeting might be Microsoft Teams’ best feature in this department. All you need to do to invite outside guests to a meeting is to share a web link using their valid email address, whether they are inside or outside of your organization. From there, they can join the meeting via their web browser without installing anything or creating a new account.

Calls

Microsoft Teams allows your developers and stakeholders to communicate in more ways than one. In addition to online meetings and video conferencing, teams can use the tool to make and receive calls, as well as:

• Bring others into your one-on-one or group calls
• Transfer calls to colleagues and across devices
• Access voicemail and view summaries and transcripts
• Transcribe calls

Chat

Instant messaging is another way to stay in touch with colleagues using Microsoft Teams. Whether you want to chat with a specific team member or an entire group of developers, you can do it all here with features like:

• Rich text editing with headings, links, bullet points, quotes, highlights, italics, etc.
• Chat with yourself to store notes, files, and media that you don’t want to lose that you’ll need to share with others later
• Inline message translation to collaborate with others worldwide
• @mentions to get the attention of specific team members
• Priority notifications to flag messages as vital
• Video clip responses
• Different post types for announcements, conversations, etc.
• GIPHYs, stickers, and reactions
• Schedule send to deliver chat messages in the future
• Pinned chats
• Team channels that group related chat conversations

Collaboration

Project managers and developers can hold video meetings, make calls, and chat with colleagues to collaborate via Microsoft Teams. You can also use the following features to ensure that everyone is on the same page:

• File sharing
• Real-time co-creation and simultaneous content editing that allows you to work on a single file with other team members
• Automatic synchronization
• Version history tracking
• Integrations with popular collaboration apps like Slack, Trello, etc.

Microsoft Teams Pricing

Software development organizations have five different Microsoft Teams pricing plans to choose from. The free plan offers you online meetings for calls and video for up to 100 participants. Each group meeting can last a maximum of 60 minutes, while each one-on-one meeting lasts a maximum of 30 hours. The free plan also gives you screen sharing, custom backgrounds, scheduled meetings, noise suppression, chat for up to 100 users, file attachments/storage, and Outlook/Skype contact import.

• The Microsoft Teams Essentials plan costs €3.70 per user per month with annual billing. It allows for extras like meetings and chat for up to 300 participants, 30-hour meeting durations, and enhanced file storage. 
• For €5.60 per user, per month, you can access the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan, which grants you benefits like live captions for 30+ languages, meeting recordings and transcripts, workgroups, a whiteboard, collaborative annotations, guest access, 250+ app integrations, Exchange email hosting and a custom email domain address, Microsoft Bookings, Single Sign-On, and advanced control and reporting.
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard costs €11.70 per user per month and allows you to host webinars while providing all of the benefits listed above.

Microsoft Teams Pros and Cons

One of the easiest ways to decide whether Microsoft Teams is the right collaboration tool for your development team is to weigh the app’s strengths against its weaknesses. Here’s a look at what Teams does well and where it could be improved:

Microsoft Teams Advantages

• More than just video conferencing, Microsoft Teams allows you to collaborate via virtual meetings, chat, file-sharing, etc., all in one place without the need to switch between apps
• Teams is easy to use, even for outsiders who have never used the app before, and requires no downloads or account creation to join
• Superb chat that rivals Teams’ strong video conferencing capabilities
• Skype integration
• Great for video conferencing
• Provides solid audio and video quality without bogging down your system
• 99.9% uptime rate for paid users
• Data encryption for all subscriptions and advanced security features like two-factor authentication for paid plans
• Integration with other Microsoft products and popular third-party apps like Slack, Trello, Zoom, etc.
• Quick support with screen sharing for more complex issues

Microsoft Teams Cons

• While chat is one of its strong suits, some feel that other chat apps like Slack are better than Teams
• Screen sharing glitches at times
• Beginners might take some time to get used to Teams’ interface

Is Microsoft Teams Right for You?

Is Microsoft Teams the only video conferencing and collaboration tool available? No, but if you are looking for an app that offers chat and video conferencing features, solid audio and video quality, excellent security, and integrations with numerous Microsoft and third-party apps, you will likely find Microsoft Teams hard to beat.

Pubblicato in Digital Tools