Microsoft Teams for Windows — Free

office-365 — **Microsoft Teams for Windows — Free**

The business world is always searching for the next best collaboration platform.

There are certainly plenty of options to choose from.

But one solution stands out as particularly useful: Microsoft Teams.

And it is included completely free with Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

Let's dive into everything you need to know about this outstanding collaboration solution for businesses, freelancers, and anyone else working in a professional team setup.

What are the features of Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a persistent chat-based platform for collaboration, featuring document sharing, online meetings, and many other extremely useful features for business communications.

Having an excellent team space is essential for being able to make creative decisions and communicate with one another.

Shared workspace software makes achieving that much easier,

especially when a particular team is part of a very large company,

or has many remote employees, or consists of a large number of team members.

Features that make Microsoft Teams stand out from other collaboration software:

Teams and Channels. Teams are made up of channels, which are conversation boards between team members.

Conversations within channels and teams. All team members can view and contribute to the various conversations in the general channel, and they can use the @ function to invite other members into different conversations — unlike Slack.

Chat function. The basic chat function found in most collaboration apps is commonly available and can take place between teams, groups, and individuals.

Document storage in SharePoint. Every team using Microsoft Teams will have a site in SharePoint Online, which will contain a default document library folder. All files shared across all conversations will automatically be saved to this folder. Permissions and security options can also be customized for sensitive information.

Online video calls and screen sharing. Enjoy smooth, fast video calls with employees inside your business or clients outside it. A good video call feature is a great asset in a collaboration platform. One can also enjoy quick and easy desktop sharing for technical support and real-time collaboration between multiple users.

Online meetings. This feature can help improve your communications, company-wide meetings, and even training through an online meetings function that can host up to 10,000 users. Online meetings can include anyone from inside or outside the company. This feature also includes a scheduling assistant, a note-taking app, file uploads, and in-meeting chat messaging.

Audio conferencing. This is a feature you won't find on many collaboration platforms. With audio conferencing, anyone can join an online meeting via phone. Through a dial-in number that spans hundreds of cities, even users on the go can participate without needing internet access. Note that this requires an additional license.

Full telephony. That's right! The days of hunting for VoIP vendors and overspending on a phone system are finally over. Microsoft 365 Business Voice can completely replace your company's existing phone system. Note that this requires an additional license.

Simply put, Microsoft Teams is similar in concept to the popular collaboration software Slack, but with many more bells and whistles. Additionally, Microsoft Teams is included free in Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

Why should your business use Microsoft Teams?

When it comes down to it, companies should use Microsoft Teams because it is extremely easy to use and can facilitate a productive work environment among remote users or within a large company.

Projects, production workflows, and other business operations can all benefit from Microsoft Teams.

For companies already using Skype for Business,

the Microsoft Teams client will replace the Skype client, but all existing add-on functionality will remain intact.

Using Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a very simple and easy-to-use application.

Very little setup is required. However, it is important to think about how the company wants to use the platform before rolling it out across the organization.

There are two main approaches to consider:

The Organic Approach. A company can choose to implement Microsoft Teams immediately in a "completely free-for-all" manner where everyone in the company can do whatever they want with the platform, and Microsoft Teams adoption and usage can grow naturally.

The Controlled Approach. This more managed approach involves mandating the use of Microsoft Teams for specific aspects of the company. It also involves strict control over who can use it and who can do certain things within it, resulting in a phased rollout plan across the organization.

You can choose to do something that incorporates both of these approaches or something somewhere in between. What is right for a given organization depends on its culture and use cases. Teams can be managed and configured directly from the Teams admin center.

From a user perspective, Teams is very intuitive and has a very small learning curve compared to more complex collaboration tools.

Detailed training can be provided if needed for team members, but there are also excellent online user training materials available from Microsoft.

These materials are presented as a series of very short videos on how to do different things and perform different functions within Microsoft Teams.

Due to how easy and simple it is to share documents within Microsoft Teams with many or all members,

custom training materials and work instructions can be made available within the platform for new users or employees to access.

Teams is a powerful and extremely useful collaboration environment that will only grow in popularity.

Microsoft Teams is included in Office 365 for free,

so any Office user can enjoy all the benefits of this collaboration solution. In short,

it simplifies teamwork through collaboration, sharing, and communication — all within a single platform.

Compete366 is a Microsoft SMB partner.

We specialize in helping small and medium-sized businesses excel in their respective competitive industries through the use of Microsoft cloud technology.

We strive to help our clients save money and increase their revenue.