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[accordion title="Save%20Messages%20or%20Bookmarks"]This is a really useful piece of functionality that allows you to save a particular message, or more accurately a position in a conversation or chat, just by clicking on the sash icon at the top of the message:
Then you can recall all your saved messages by clicking on your profile picture top right and selecting ‘Saved’ or possibly quicker would be to type in the command bar /saved. This gives you a list of all your saved points and on clicking on them takes you back to the point in the conversation you saved from.[/accordion]
[accordion title="Tabs"]So a must for productivity and ease of access within your working group is taking advantage of the tabs within your Teams and Channels. From Simply exposing a website or file to be easily accessible through to more complex Apps to manage work and help with day to day activities.
All you need to do to add a tab is click the ‘+’ sign on the right hand side of your Channel and then search for what it is you want to add in, the main MS Apps or at the top with the remainder lower down.:
There are too many to mention them all, however here are some of the ways I have found tabs useful in Teams:
- Simply Exposing Office documents or Websites on a tab for quick reference – I have found this useful in a number of scenarios from quick access to templates through to tracking spreadsheets of various kinds. In fact we recently placed the Collab365 Teams live show onto a tab in our Collab365 Teams based Teams Community (so far with over 500 Members in as Guests to our tenant), a lot of teams in that sentence!
- Task Management – Here at Collab365 we have used tabs to expose both Microsoft Planner and tools like trello, depending on the audience involved – The quick access to tasks and scheduling is really useful. There are more complex task and project management Apps that you can use from the store.
- OneNote – for those that love OneNote you can create a OneNote tab and off you go using OneNote within your Channel.
- Forms – Simply select ‘Forms’ and you can easily create a very powerful form / survey that can be managed in teams and with a tweak of the share permissions shared and filled in by anyone that has the link. The responses can be seen on the tab by the form owner and also stored in a spreadsheet in the files tab.
- Expose any existing SharePoint Document Library – Simply select the ‘SharePoint’ icon fill in site URL, select the document library you want from the list, give the tab a name, and you have the library exposed in a Teams channel.
That is just a few of the tabs we have found useful, however you only have to look at the number of Apps in the store to know there are going to be tools of all shapes and sizes, have a look around.[/accordion]
[accordion title="Don%E2%80%99t%20put%20all%20your%20eggs%20in%20%E2%80%98General%E2%80%99"]When you first start using Teams it is tempting to keep everything in the General channel of your team, adding tab after tab for each need you come across. Now in some circumstances with small teams this is fine however in most it will lead to confusion and making it hard to find stuff.
So here are some recommendations:
- Think of the General channel as the landing page for your Team the hub for the high level interaction.
- Then for each subject area or main function create a new Channel.
- When adding a tab to General, always ask yourself would this work better as its own channel or within another channel.
- The more tabs you add to General the less people will find them. So try the rule that when the number of tabs doesn’t fit on your standard working screen size ( different for everyone) start thinking about flipping the tabs to existing or new channels.
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[accordion title="All%20your%20Wiki%E2%80%99s%20in%20one%20place"]If you are using the Wikis within teams then this is a fantastic feature to help with your productivity. Simply click on ‘…’ on the left hand menu and choose ‘Wiki’.
This will take you to the Wiki home page on your ‘Personal‘ Wiki tag, this is a great place for taking private notes.
Click on the ‘All‘ tab and it gives you a summary view of all the Wikis you are involved in, making it easy to navigate, consume and update them.
A real nice extra on the Personal Wiki is being able to add notes from anywhere using the top command box. Simply type ‘/wiki’ the press enter and you can then type your note, press enter again and your note will be added, press enter a 3rd time and it will take you to your Personal Wiki.[/accordion]
[accordion title="Record%20your%20Teams%20meetings"]You can record your Microsoft Teams meetings. The recording captures Audio, Video, and any screen sharing activities. The meeting is recorded in the cloud and saved to Stream , meaning you can manage, download, and share along with all your organisations other Video content.
At the most basic level this allows you to have a record of what was discussed either to go back to or share with team members that could not attend. However this can be used to easily create company or department announcements, management team updates, news items, demos, solutions to commons problems or any other communications you might use video for in your organisation.
So how do we do it?…well it couldnt be simplier, once in the meeting just click the ‘…’ and click ‘Start Recording’ like this:
Once clicked you will be told you are recording in a message at the top of the meeting. Once finished you simply click stop recording from the same menu.
The video is saved to Stream, however you will also see a link to it in the meeting chat window, and be emailed a link to it from Stream. Obviously as with all your Stream video content, it does take up space so you need to ensure this use of Stream is included in your storage planning.[/accordion]
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