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Our Six Favourite Features for Online Collaboration using Microsoft Teams

By Nqaba Mpofu

It’s been almost a year since South Africa (and many other countries around the world) went into their first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At IPK, we made minor adjustments to our ways of working. This was due to the fact that we had already adopted a hybrid approach to working, and were thus able to build on the lessons learned as we were forced into an entirely virtual collaboration modality.

Part of our learning includes exploring a host of virtual tools and platforms that can enhance our service offering. With the market flooded with such tools, sometimes making the choice to explore a tool or platform is driven by our clients’ needs and their IT departments’ security protocols. While we often try to the best of our ability to work with our clients’ preference for a specific virtual platform, we also advise our clients which virtual platforms are best suited for the type of interactions they would like to realise in their virtual events.

Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) is one such platform that our clients use. MS Teams is a chat-based collaboration platform with document sharing, online video meetings, and many more useful features for collaboration. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll share the features that we most often use to encourage participation and co-creation. These features, which we list below in no specific order, have either been released recently or have existed for a while. Let’s explore them one by one.

  1. Online video calling and screen sharing
    MS Teams lets you enjoy seamless and fast video calls to people within and outside your organisation. It also allows you to enjoy simple and fast desktop sharing for technical assistance and multi-user real-time collaboration with up to 10 000 users (depending on your plan). This feature also includes a scheduling aid, a note-taking app, file uploading, and in-meeting chat messaging.
  2. Audio conferencing
    This is a feature that allows anyone to join an online meeting via phone. With a dial-in number that covers a number of cities, users on the go can participate with no internet required. Please note that this feature requires additional licensing.
  3. Breakout rooms
    MS Teams recently added the breakout room feature. This allows you to divide your users into smaller working groups that can focus on specific points or even brainstorm together. MS Teams allows you to split your meeting participants in up to 50 breakout rooms. You can pre-assign participants to the breakout rooms when you schedule the meeting instead of managing them during the meeting. In breakout rooms, participants have full audio, video, and screen share capabilities. You can also send announcements to the breakout rooms, and recall all participants back to the main meeting at any time.
  4. Meetings with external / Guest users
    MS Teams has made it easy to collaborate with virtually everyone. As long as those you want to collaborate with have an email address then they can attend, whether or not they have an MS Teams account!
  5. Channels
    With channels, you can have specific topical discussions, subject areas or main functions in each of the channels. Channels are places where conversations happen and where the work actually gets done. They can be open to all team members or can be private. What’s more, you can include tabs, connectors, and bots that increase their value to the members of the team.
  6. Save messages or Bookmarks
    This feature allows you to save a particular message, or a position in a conversation or chat. With this feature, you can recall all your saved messages. This gives you a list of all your saved points and clicking on them takes you back to the point in the conversation you saved from.

Like all video conferencing platforms, getting the basics right is crucial to have an enjoyable experience. With MS Teams having so many features that promote collaboration, productivity and communication, receiving a user training is essential in order to unlock the maximum benefit. At IPK, we have made this our standard practice when exposing our clients to new platforms and tools. Changing the way people go about their work is not about switching from one platform to another, it’s about changing the behaviour of people. It’s naïve to think that shifting habits and styles of work which have been ingrained over time without any effort will happen overnight. This is why we invest the time and effort to ensure that our clients are trained on how to navigate the many features within MS Teams.

At IPK we continuously explore new possibilities of meeting and working virtually in fun, engaging and results oriented ways. If you would like to learn more about our experience or MS Teams training offering, please contact us by email on info@i-p-k.co.za. We look forward to connecting with you!

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