Microsoft Teams Information

Microsoft Teams is your platform for collaboration with your colleagues. Teams allows you publish, share and work on documents collaboratively with your team. It also acts as the central hub for all of your team communication and planning.

Collaboration

Using Microsoft Teams you can create, share and edit together with your team in real time. Teams accomplishes this through integrating the editing capabilities of the online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with the file storage functions of SharePoint Online. This means that as you are making changes to a document, your changes are published to the cloud and updated for your teammates in real time.

Communication

Strong communication is what makes a good team great, and Teams can help you with that. Every team on Teams has a general channel where all users can post questions and comments, but you can also create different channels for more specific uses, for example a channel for a new project where ideas and documents can be posted. Every channel in a team has its own folder created within SharePoint for storing files and each channel can have its own list of users who can access it.

Planning

While Teams itself does not have a lot of planning and project management capability it does integrate SharePoint Online which allows you to create project plans and assign project tasks to different team members.  As well, the Planner app can be added as a tab on Team pages to help you track and assign tasks.

To get started with Teams you can either download and install the program here or you can access it online here.

Guides for Installing Microsoft Teams:

• Teams for Microsoft Windows
• Teams for Apple macOS

All TRU employees can immediately sign in using their TRU credentials.  Students need to create their free Microsoft Office 365 account before they are able to log in. They can do so by reviewing our Office 365 page and reading the How do I get Access to Microsoft 365? information.

There are 2 types of teams, Public and Private.

Public Teams can be accessed by anyone at the university at any time, an example of a public team is our Team on Teams group where you can post questions, share resources, and get support from your TRU colleagues.

Private Teams can only be accessed by those who have been invited to join the team by a team owner.

Any employee can create a new team, and instructions for creating and managing a team can be found attached here on this article, we suggest that any new teams that you create be created as private teams and be based on a template that we have created.

To create your team based on our template select "Other" for the team type and click the "Create a team using an existing team as a Template" link, then choose the "Teams Template-O365-O365" team as your template.

Instructions for navigating Teams and setting up Teams meetings can be found attached here on this article.

All teams created based on IT Services template will have a tab to view the SharePoint Online site associated with that team.

To open SharePoint Online in your web browser simply click the Go to Website button found in the top-right of the SharePoint Online tab.

Additional training resources for Teams can be found on Microsoft's Teams training page.

LinkedIn Learning has many great courses, here are a few recommendations:

• Microsoft Teams Essential Training
• Microsoft Teams for Education

The IT Service Desk is also available to assist you in the setup and use of Microsoft Teams, The IT Service Desk contact information can be found here on the ITS Portal.