What Are the Best Microsoft Teams Collaboration Features?

Quick Answer

Microsoft Teams is a unified collaboration platform for communication, file sharing, meetings, and teamwork in one place. Its key features include: 

• Channels
• Chat 
• Video conferencing 
• File collaboration 
• App integrations 
• Shared calendars 
• Virtual whiteboards 
• Meeting recaps 
• Guest access
• Polling

Microsoft Teams was introduced in 2017 and has since evolved into a widely used workplace collaboration platform. Today, Teams brings messaging, meetings, calling, file sharing, document collaboration, scheduling, and business apps together in one place, helping organizations streamline communication and teamwork.

Different Teams features are best suited to different collaboration needs:

• Team communication: Channels and chat help organize ongoing conversations by team, project, or topic.
• Remote and hybrid collaboration: Meetings and video conferencing support virtual meetings, screen sharing, recordings, and live captions.
• Document collaboration: File sharing and real-time co-editing help teams work together on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. 
• Team scheduling: Shared calendars and scheduling tools help coordinate meetings and keep teams aligned.
• Brainstorming and decision-making: Whiteboard and Polling make it easier to share ideas and gather feedback.
• External collaboration: Guest access allows teams to work with clients, partners, and other external users.
• Connected workflows: App integrations and custom tabs bring frequently used tools and services into Teams.

Today, Teams has evolved into an all-in-one solution for business environments. This is largely due to the many useful collaborative features it offers when contrasted against its competitors. In this article, we’ll talk a bit about how to use Microsoft Teams for collaboration. We’ll also take a look at some of the collaboration features that make Microsoft’s product so appealing to businesses, both in the private and public sectors.

What is a Team in Microsoft Teams?

Before we delve into the best Microsoft Teams for project collaboration features, let’s define a “Team” within the Microsoft ecosystem. If you’re not familiar with Teams, a “team” is a collective group of individuals, content and tools designed for specific topics, projects or departments within your organization.

Teams can be public or private. Either way, they are created to facilitate collaboration and communication for explicit purposes. This could mean a project, department, topic or other common interest the group shares.

Reasons to Use Microsoft Teams

Traditionally, when collaboration in the workplace is necessary, people have had to meet face-to-face, talk on the phone or go back and forth in emails. Sharing files could be incredibly cumbersome and involve sending large file attachments, which may need to be broken up into multiple emails

As a collaborative tool, Microsoft Teams eliminates many of the burdens people have historically faced when working together. The following are good reasons to consider choosing Teams as the software to integrate into your workflow.

• Highly user friendly. With the click of a button, conversations and meetings can easily take place.
• Real-time coauthoring. Teams enables multiple users to edit shared documents simultaneously, making collaboration faster and keeping content current.  
• One-stop collaboration. People can meet, chat, call and collaborate in one digital space, even with other apps.
• Integrated meetings. Teams brings meetings, chat, calling and collaboration together, making it easier for employees to communicate and work together without switching between platforms. Collaboration teams can also use these integrated features to coordinate discussions, share information, and work together from a central workspace.
• Multiple collaborative tools. Not everyone works the same and Microsoft accounts for this by including numerous features; continuously adding more. App integration is very straightforward.
• App integration. Teams integrates with Microsoft 365 applications and numerous third-party apps, allowing users to access the tools they need within their collaboration environment. 
• File collaboration. Teams makes it easier for users to share, access and collaborate on files while working together in chats and channels. 
• Governance and control. Teams provides organizations with administrative controls and policies that can help manage users, access, collaboration, and information across the Teams environment. 
• Cost-effective. Teams comes with an Office 365 subscription, making it highly affordable.

Top Microsoft Teams Collaboration Features

If your organization is seeking an online platform to empower your employees to chat, interact and collaborate? If so, Microsoft Teams may be the right solution for your organization. It offers powerful capabilities that can be leveraged by businesses to drive engagement and productivity.

Let’s take a look at some of the most attractive and practical features to help your teams communicate more effectively, stay organized and simply get work done — whether they’re in the office, remote or hybrid.

Microsoft Teams Collaboration Features for Business

The practical features embedded in Microsoft Teams are highly useful in boosting productivity while simultaneously providing your employees with an easy-to-use product. Since it seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365, this can help your organization get more from Teams. The following are great practical features that can help the internal Teams your organization establishes.

Channels

Channels is a Teams feature that many organizations find highly useful. It can be used to organize conversations and projects by department, topic, project or client.

Channels are online spaces where people can have conversations and work collaboratively. They can be structured as standard (open to all team members), private or to be utilized by people both inside and outside the team.

Additionally, any files shared in Channels are stored in SharePoint, which is easily integrated with Teams.

Red River Expert Tip: Use channels consistently for projects, departments, or recurring topics instead of creating a new Team for every conversation. A clear structure can help prevent Teams sprawl and make information easier to find. 

Chat & Threaded Conversations

Chat and Threaded Conversations are core features of Teams. With terrific communication features, your employees can enjoy real-time messaging and easy file-sharing for their collaborative efforts. Additionally, chat history is compiled all in one place, and users can establish different chat channels to organize by topic, making these “threads” easy to find.

Able to support both individual and group messages, your teams can work in small or large groups. If necessary, they can be elevated to video or voice calls with a simple click of a button. Additionally, users have the handy option to send emails to their Team Channel members. When a message is sent, it appears in a threaded conversation, easily viewable by all Team members.

Calling

Teams includes a cloud-based telephony feature to allow users to call one another from within the Teams environment. Teams Phone extends these capabilities by providing business calling features, including PSTN calling, voicemail, call queues, and auto attendants where configured. These features can help organizations manage internal and external calls while routing callers to the appropriate people or departments.

Meetings & Video Conferencing

Teams offers users comprehensive virtual meeting capabilities with its video conferencing features. Users can enjoy one-on-one or group video conferences, which include customizable options, such as virtual backgrounds, the ability to record, screen sharing and live captions.

Need a large virtual space? Teams’ Webinar feature supports up to 1,000 meeting attendees. Meeting leaders have access to moderation controls, and attendees can post live reactions. Have a larger group you want to broadcast to? The conferencing feature can accommodate up to 10,000 view-only attendees.

File Collaboration

File-sharing and co-editing are vital components of collaboration, and Teams does include features to help users easily facilitate sharing. Files can be shared in one-on-one chats, in group chats or in team channels. Files in chats are stored in OneDrive for Business, while those in channels go to the team’s SharePoint location.

Users can also co-author and co-edit documents in Word, Excel and PowerPoint directly in Teams; this can be done separately or in real-time. Simply open the file in Teams, either online or on your desktop.

Red River Expert Tip: Establish clear file organization and permissions early. Using Teams with SharePoint and OneDrive can make collaboration easier, but a consistent approach to file storage and access helps prevent duplicate or misplaced content. 

App Integrations

Teams can integrate effortlessly with other Microsoft products, including 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It also has built-in tools, such as Planner, OneNote and Power BI; you can even integrate numerous third-party apps.

These integrations matter because they reduce the need to switch between separate applications and help keep communication and work in one place. For example, a project team can use Planner within Teams to manage tasks while using a connected channel to discuss the project and share related files.

Shared Calendars and Scheduling

One of the biggest challenges enterprise-sized organizations face is getting everyone aligned with one another. Team’s shared calendars and schedule features can help keep everyone on the same page. Users can quickly look at the calendar and keep track of meetings. With Teams’ seamless integration with Outlook, your employees will receive automatic notifications for any meetings scheduled in Teams.

Teams also integrates with Outlook to support meeting scheduling, calendar management, and availability. Users can view schedules, check availability, and find suitable meeting times before sending invitations. Shared calendars can also help teams coordinate meetings and stay aligned on schedules across departments. 

Search & Command Bar

Microsoft Teams offers a convenient feature in its command bar, located at the top of the Teams window. Users can utilize it to quickly find messages, identify locations of or access files or launch actions.

Teams App Bar

This feature empowers users to pin personal apps to their Teams. Once pinned on the Teams app bar, the app is available for quick, one-click access. Your users can also pin apps to specific channels or chats.

Security

Keeping unauthorized eyes off data is important for all organizations. Teams is an important distinguishing feature that other like products do not offer. If you’re worried about Microsoft Teams collaboration security, you need not fret. Microsoft Teams is aligned with Microsoft 365’s security standards. Users will need to follow two-factor authentication and single sign-on prompts. Teams’ administrators also have the option to set boundaries to restrict user access so they cannot view sensitive information.

Red River Expert Tip: Teams governance should be planned before your environment grows. Define policies for team creation, guest access, naming, permissions, and lifecycle management to maintain control as more employees and external users join Teams. 

Slash commands

Slash commands are a favorite feature for many because they save time and facilitate productivity. Users just need to simply type the “/” command in Team’s message box and numerous options pop up.

Users can send quick messages, make a call, show gratitude to Team members, set status, send invites and much more. For example, you can quickly type “/away” and your status is instantly set.

Virtual Whiteboard

Teams’ virtual whiteboard works much like a traditional board because it’s a way for people to collaborate in one section. Whether your teams want to brainstorm, contribute comments and share ideas, this helps them easily do this. Meeting attendees can utilize the Whiteboard app to exchange content in real-time, including adding and removing ideas – a great collaborative tool.

The Whiteboard is particularly useful for brainstorming, meeting collaboration, and visual planning. For example, teams can use it during a project meeting to map out ideas, organize workflows, sketch processes, or plan upcoming tasks together in real time. This gives participants a shared visual space to contribute ideas and build on one another’s input during a meeting. 

Meeting Recaps

At the heart of Teams is meetings. Meeting recaps are automatically generated when a meeting concludes, so all users can easily access the key points of the meeting. Within the recap are attendees, chat messages, meeting notes, files shared and a recording of any videos.

Guest User Access

Organizations that are partnering with other organizations to fulfill a mission can utilize Teams through its guest access feature. One organization can allow external members with corporate or personal email accounts to have access to things like Team meetings, threads, meetings and files.

Custom Tabs

Conversations in Teams contains a feature called Tabs, which allows users to easily access their most frequently used tools, services and files. Tabs offers two types, one for individual users for their own convenience, and the other can be utilized in group chats occurring in Teams channels. Creating a Tab is straightforward; simply click + on the Tab bar, choose the app you want to add, give your Tab a name, and then save it.

Polling

Users can create their own polls to gather feedback from participants in meetings or group chats. When collaborating with others, this is helpful to solicit opinions. This feature is also highly time-saving if you need participant input to make quick decisions.

Organizations Often Underuse Teams

Teams is packed with features — but many companies underuse it. This underuse can be attributed to many factors, including but not limited to: reliance on legacy systems, inadequate user training, organizational resistance to change, unclear ownership of who owns and manages Teams, security risks and compliance issues.

Teams “Sprawl” is also an ongoing and persistent issue for many organizations. What this means is essentially an underutilization of Teams, and results in significant cost implications. For example, unnecessary creation of Teams or underutilized groups use storage space and lead to other IT overhead expenses (e.g., cleaning up Teams and SharePoint locations).

Learning how to effectively leverage Microsoft Teams and its many features can be a great asset for organizations, but underutilization will be a costly hindrance. To alleviate the problematic issues many businesses routinely face with Teams, consider working with a partner to help with training, customization and governance.

Want to Make the Most of Your Microsoft Subscription? Red River Can Help!

Collaboration internally or externally between organizational members is a vital component to getting things done. Teams is a great tool to help your company collaborate in a productive and cost-efficient manner. It makes collaboration within the team easier by giving members a shared space to communicate, share files, and coordinate work.

There are many intricacies involved in successfully setting up Teams software. Misusing or underutilizing features can quickly create a cumbersome and expensive experience. The professional experts at Red River are fully versed in Teams and can help your company effectively integrate it into your workflows.

Red River is often chosen as a trusted partner for a number of reasons. Our team is a group of seasoned professionals with extensive experience. Our experts continuously keep up-to-date on the newest products and features, passing on what they know to our clients, helping them to gain access to cutting edge tools and maintain a competitive advantage.

Ready to better leverage Microsoft Teams?  Contact Red River today to schedule a consultation.

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