7 Must Have Office 365 Apps #5: Teams

Teams is one of the most diverse applications you’ll find in Office 365. It plays a much bigger role in the Office 365 landscape now that Skype is migrating to Teams for cloud users. Microsoft is also very active in providing new capabilities for the Teams application.

What is Teams?

Teams is Microsoft’s collaboration tool that is part of the Office 365 family. It offers a variety of capabilities, including:

• Video and audio calls
• Impromptu or scheduled meetings with recording capability
• Shared document editing in real time
• Meetings tracked on a calendar that connects to Microsoft Outlook
• Instant messaging in a chat window
• App for mobile devices

Apps for Office 365 Teams

In addition to the often-discussed capabilities that Teams offers, Microsoft is releasing apps to increase Teams’ usefulness. Here are a few examples of the apps that are available.

Polly for Microsoft Teams

Have you ever wished there was an easy and quick way to get opinions from your team, or answers to a set of questions? The old way is to send emails and then manually tabulate the answers. It takes quite a bit of time and effort.

Now, using the Polly app, you can create polls right from your Teams’ channel, and Polly will tabulate the results for you. You’ll enjoy the time-saving features, including:

• Question Types: Questions to fit your needs, including multiple choice, ranking 1 to 5, agree/disagree, open-ended
• Schedule polls: Create the poll when you have time and schedule it to be published when the time is right
• Set a closing date: Encourage your team to respond promptly

The open-ended questions are great when just a yes or no won’t do. You’ll get a report consolidating all the written responses for your review.

Q for Teams

If you need to keep up with publically available information, the artificial intelligence in Q will make your job much easier. You can use Q to stay current with happenings in your industry and coverage of your competitors, for example.

With the overwhelming amount of information available today, your users will enjoy having an application that understands what you’re working on and finds the information you need before you ask for it. Q can search through millions of sources to pull relevant information. You can make Q even more useful by allowing it to connect to industry databases and your own organization’s stored content.

As you accept or reject content Q has found, and as Q monitors your business interactions, the artificial intelligence component will continuously refine the information it presents.

Disco

Many companies are looking for easy ways to provide employee motivation and establish reward systems. Disco is available in Teams to do just that. When employees have the chance to congratulate each other on a job well done, it increases the teamwork atmosphere.

Disco works on a star system, and you can include company values in the setup. With your values in place, when someone gives stars, they can also select which value the employee displayed. Maybe it’s dependability, commitment, honesty, or customer focus. According to Microsoft, Disco can increase employee loyalty and reduce turnover.

Final Thoughts

Office 365 Teams application, and the things you can add to it, are going to make a real difference in how your organization works. If you’re not sure where to start with Teams, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.