Should You Use Microsoft Teams For Your Business?
This blog post was updated on August 29, 2024
It was originally published on August 8, 2020
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams, sometimes called just Teams, is a cloud-based unified communication platform, that offers persistent chat, video meetings, file storage, real-time collaboration, and application integration. Teams integrates with the Microsoft 365 productivity suite and it also offers feature extensions that integrate with non-Microsoft products.
Teams is the completely overhauled evolution of Skype for Business, which was replaced by Microsoft Teams completely by 2021. As a business communications application, it competes with Slack, Cisco Webex Teams, and Google Workspace. Among these apps, Microsoft Teams has leap-frogged to the front owing to its already comprehensive suite of productivity and business applications that are now accessible from a single, unified platform, i.e. Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams Overview
The core feature of Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace featuring groups as well as private conversations that are threaded and persistent. But Microsoft Teams has many more features that make it a stand-out communication and collaboration application.
Here are the key features of Microsoft Teams:
Architecture
Teams is built on Microsoft Graph with the same enterprise-level security and manageability as Microsoft 365.
Each Team comes along with:
A new Microsoft 365 group
SharePoint Online site and a document library for file storing
A shared mailbox and calendar via Exchange Online, and
It ties in with the other Microsoft 365 and Office applications
Teams also integrates with third-party applications and can be customized using apps, bots, and connectors. People from outside an organization can also be added as guests to a team or channel.
Teams And Channels
A team is a group where people can connect and collaborate in real time. Within teams, you can create channels that serve as conversation boards for the members of the channel. The channels can be public, i.e. anyone within the team can join, or private, i.e. only invited members can join. People from outside your organization can also be invited to join teams or channels. All team members can view and participate in the conversations happening in the channels to which they belong. Similar to Slack, you can use an @ mention to tag other members in the conversations.
Chat
The chat function is becoming ubiquitous in most collaboration tools. Chats are rapidly becoming the hallmark of a modern workplace where teams have moved away from traditional emailing. Conversations now take place right where the work happens- be it informal chats, shared projects, collaboration on deliverables, or impromptu as well as pre-scheduled meetings. The chats can take place between individuals, or among teams and groups.
Document Storage
As mentioned earlier, each team in Microsoft Teams gets its own SharePoint Online site, which contains a default document library folder and functions as a library for file storage. All the files that are shared in any of the conversations are automatically saved to the SharePoint folder. Access permissions and security options are customizable so that you can restrict access to sensitive information.
Online Meetings
Microsoft Teams’ online or web meeting feature makes the virtual meeting experience a whole lot easier. Features such as scheduling assistance, meeting note-taking, screen sharing, meeting recording, and instant messaging enhance your meeting experience. There’s a two-way sync between your calendar in Teams and your Exchange calendar. This means that when you schedule a meeting in Teams, it'll show up in Outlook, and vice versa.
As soon as you create a meeting on your calendar, you can start chatting with the participants, share files and updates on tasks, and keep track of the meeting notes, all in one place. You can also invite guests outside your organization for your online meetings. Microsoft Teams gives you access to fast and seamless video calling and screen-sharing features, which are essential for online collaboration. For webinars, online classes, etc., you can create live events that can host up to 10,000 users.
After your meeting, the recording of the meeting is available in the Chat history of that meeting and is searchable for easy access in the future. So even if any invited person couldn’t attend the meeting, the meeting recording is readily available for them along with the meeting notes and files. Thus, many of the pre and post-meeting hassles have been completely removed by Microsoft Teams.
Audio Conferencing
The modern-day workforce is mobile. This means that there may be times when your meeting participants may not be able to sit down with a laptop or a smartphone with a proper data connection to attend the meetings. At such times, they need to use a phone to call into a meeting. Microsoft Teams is equipped for such instances and allows people to call into a Teams meeting using a phone call instead of the Teams application. The Audio Conferencing feature needs to be set up only for those participants who schedule or lead meetings; the standard attendees don’t need any licenses or setups, they can simply dial in.
Full Telephony
You can replace your existing on-premises PBX (Private Branch Exchange) system with Microsoft Teams Phone System, which comes with a set of features closely integrated with Microsoft 365.With Microsoft Teams Phone System, you can use Teams to place and receive calls, transfer calls, and access the business features of VoIP telephony. If you aren’t familiar with what a phone system can do for your business, here are a few handy features:
Auto attendants allows you to create a menu system that lets callers move through the system to locate, place, or transfer calls.
Call queues - greetings are triggered when someone calls specific phone numbers in your organization. The call queue greetings have the ability to put the call on hold and to search and transfer the call to another available number or agent. You can create single or multiple queues for your organization.
Voicemail - Cloud voicemail is automatically set up for each user with a Phone System license.
What Are The Benefits And Drawbacks Of Microsoft Teams?
Here are the pros and cons of Microsoft Teams:
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Many of the drawbacks of Microsoft Teams are related to the application itself and it’s possible that they will be resolved in the future.
How Does Microsoft Teams Compare With Slack?
Microsoft Teams is in direct competition with Slack, which is a popular name among communications and collaboration applications. The basic functionality of both Teams and Slack are very similar. Here’s a quick comparison of Microsoft Teams and Slack:
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Slack |
Microsoft Teams |
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What’s The Price Of Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams offers a free version but also comes bundled with its suite of productivity applications. Here’s a table of the pricing for Microsoft Teams as of August 2024:
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Microsoft Teams (free) |
Microsoft Teams Essentials |
Microsoft 365 Business Basic |
Microsoft 365 Business Standard |
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Free (no-commitment) |
USD$4.00* user/month (annual subscription) |
USD$6.00* user/month (annual subscription) |
USD$12.50* user/month (annual subscription) |
*Price does not include tax.
Refer to the Microsoft site for the latest pricing plans of Teams.
Should Your Business Move To Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams although similar in core concept to Slack, comes with many more bells and whistles. In addition, Microsoft Teams comes bundled with Microsoft 365 at no additional cost, making it an easy choice for Microsoft 365 users. For those businesses already using Microsoft 365 environment, the transition to Teams will be easy.
Teams isn’t just a communication tool, it’s a powerful and comprehensive collaboration environment that provides you with all the tools needed for collaboration in a single place. It is built from scratch and is fully cloud-based. Therefore, it isn’t encumbered by the traditional desktop applications that were characteristic of Microsoft’s earlier products such as Office 365. This makes Teams very suitable for the modern-day workplace, which is highly mobile and consists of distributed teams and remote workers.
Are you looking to transition your business to Microsoft 365 environment? Jones IT has extensive experience in migrating businesses to Microsoft 365. To ensure your data isn’t lost in translation, we carefully plan the migration drawing upon our extensive experience in similar migrations using which we have created a set of best practices for managing the migration to Microsoft 365 or Office 365.
No matter the size of your company or the extent of your data, we will avoid the common problems associated with Microsoft 365 migrations and will complete the migration on schedule and within budget.
About The Author
Hari SubediMarketing Manager at Jones IT
Hari is an online marketing professional with a focus on content marketing. He writes on topics related to IT, Security, and Small Business. He is also the founder and managing director of Girivar Kft., a business services company located in Budapest, Hungary.