I saved Microsoft Teams for last because so much of Microsoft 365 works with Teams in one way or another. Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s digital collaboration tool that brings together all the best elements of Microsoft 365. Teams connects to nearly every other tool from the Office 365 suite and provides a central hub for everything you do in your workday. 

As I alluded to in the last lecture, Teams is built on SharePoint, which is essentially a fancy way of saying that everything within Teams can be found in SharePoint. Because of this, all the files and data in Teams can be edited and accessed through SharePoint and allows for file sharing directly from teams. Everything in teams is meant to make your job easier, with that in mind simple things like sharing a file can be a simple of dragging and dropping a file into a specific location or sharing a file directly from your OneDrive. 

And since Teams syncs across most office tools you can even schedule and host video meetings with the built-in calendar that pulls data directly from your outlook calendar. Let’s take a look at teams now and see what collaboration looks like from within the software. We’ll start off here in the calendar.

It might look a little bit familiar depending upon your experience with Outlook and that is for good reason. Anything you put here will also sync with Outlook and vice versa. Let's go ahead and create a new meeting with another individual. All we want to do is click the new meeting button and go through the exact same steps and processes you'd be used to if you were using outlook. Add a title, some required attendees, set the date and time, and add details about what the meeting is about.

Since teams is automatically set up with video conferencing once you invite someone and send out the invitation you'll automatically create a digital meeting room. As you can see here I have my test meeting and if I go back into the invitation it is now populated with a new meeting room that I can join. Let's go ahead and do that now. Here I am in the pre meeting lobby. I can turn on my camera and microphone from here and once I am ready I can join. Once I join we can see that right now I'm alone in this meeting indicated by my profile picture.

When someone else does join their profile picture or initials will pop up. Now, the power of Microsoft Teams is it’s collaborative elements, you can do many things from a meeting to collaborate with others. We obviously have the standard microphone and option but we also have things like screen sharing, meeting recording, live captions, transcriptions, and file sharing built right into the meeting. If we wanted to collaborate on a document, all we have to do it come into the messages and click on this familiar little paper clip button similar to Outlook indicating the attach function.

Since teams syncs with OneDrive it allows me to share a file from my OneDrive or upload files directly from my computer. For now, let’s upload a document from my computer. Now that the document is uploaded I can go ahead and hit the send button and now that the document has been sent out so others in this meeting gains access. The nice thing about this is that if I click on this document directly in the chat I can actually open this document and still be in the meeting with my little popup window. 

Now at this point it looks identical to the demo I showcased in the word collaboration demo and as you can see, it carries over the same features into the teams version as well. Since this is a feature that is built directly into OneDrive and SharePoint it carries directly over into Microsoft Teams along with other great features like forms, tasks, and more. There is plenty more we can do in teams but lets call it there for now.