Overview:

Microsoft Teams is a unifying experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Microsoft Office 365 global, secure cloud. This article will help you learn more about what Microsoft Teams is, how to use it, and how it will benefit you in your daily computing needs.

How To Utilize Teams:

The following core capabilities are included in Teams:

• Chat: Enjoy public and private conversations with your teams. Integration of Skype video brings popular social features, such as adding emojies and custom memes to your discussion.
• Audio & Video Calling: Teams provides a simple and easy-to-use app that allows you to chat with your team via text, have a voice conversation, or a video meeting. Attendees can share their screen and text chat within the meeting.
• Schedule meetings: Easily schedule meetings for your team.
• Record a meeting: Easily record your meetings in Teams to capture audio, video, and screen sharing activity. The video is saved within Microsoft Stream, so you can share it securely across the university.
• Manage Schedules: With Shifts, your schedule management tool in Teams, managers can easily plan and create shift schedules, and team members can review schedules and make schedule change requests, all in real time.
• Files: Teams creates a SharePoint document library for each channel to provide many options for working collaboratively. Beyond simply editing and sharing files, you can select a file and start a new Conversation about it which appear in your Team Channel Conversations tab so other members of your Team can view your comments and replies. File conversations are different from Microsoft Word track changes and comments and are not embedded in the document, conversations are only visible within Teams.
• Hub: Teams offers a shared workspace for various applications in Microsoft Office including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and SharePoint. These features give you and your team the option to work natively without having to stress about toggling between applications as you try to get projects completed.
• Praise: Send digital badges to people in recognition of their efforts either directly via chat, or for wider recognition send it in a channel conversation.
• Highly Customizable: Every team is unique with differing workflow methods and requirements. Microsoft Teams allows you to tailor your team and channels to meet each groups needs. Make accessing other Office 365 services such as OneNote just a click of a tab away.

How To Access Teams:

Microsoft teams is accessible via web browsers, as well as desktop and mobile client applications. You may find yourself using one, or more of these options as you stay engaged with your team.

The best way to get familiar with teams and channels is to install the Teams app, login with your SLU email address, pick a team and channel and start exploring!

Get Microsoft Teams on all your devices:

The Microsoft Teams downloads page provides a convenient place where you can download Desktop Apps for Mac & Windows as well as Mobile Apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Start Using Microsoft Teams:

1. Start Teams.
   • In Windows, click Start > Microsoft Corporation > Microsoft Teams.
   • On mobile, tap the Teams icon.
   • On Mac, go to the Applications folder and double-click Microsoft Teams.
2. Sign in with your SLU email address (Firstname.Lastname@slu.edu) and password.

Additional Information:

SLU ITS offered a Teams training session in February 2023. This course in Workday includes that recorded seminar with questions and other attached resources:

• Microsoft Teams Presented by ITS - 90 Minutes
  In this session, we will take a brief look at Microsoft Teams and its advantages for collaboration and shared storage at SLU. This presentation includes a PowerPoint overview interspersed with several demonstrations of its components.
  Topics covered include:
  • Chat
  • Video/Audio Calls
  • Creating and Managing a Team
  • Using Channels
  • Storage and File Structures for Shared Resources

Use the additional help resources listed below to learn how to successfully use Microsoft Teams.

• Microsoft Teams Quick Start Video (54 sec)
• Microsoft Teams video training - a collection of short, usually less than 3 minutes each, video tutorials covering a wide range of Microsoft Teams topics.
• Microsoft Teams training resources
• Microsoft Teams and channels support
• Use Shifts to manage shift schedules
• Microsoft Teams tips & tricks
• Record a meeting in Teams
• There's a PDF Quick Start Guide for Teams as part of this knowledge base article under attachments to the right.

Need additional help or have issues:

For additional assistance contact the IT Service Desk at (314) 977-4000.