Over the past two years we’ve become quite accustomed to joining calls, we’ve adapted to working remotely and moving back in to the office. Thanks to applications like Microsoft Teams we’re able to carry on living and working as normal. We’ve missed face-to-face meetings and chatting around the kettle moments but we’ve adapted fast to using collaboration tools to help us stay in contact with our colleagues.
Use MS Teams Transcription to automatically take meeting minutes
During any Microsoft Teams meeting, you can start a live transcription of what’s being said. The text appears alongside the video in real-time and even includes the speaker’s name and time stamp. Live transcriptions not only act as a handy tool to use to take meeting minutes but also acts as an inclusive tool for people who are hard of hearing or are in a noisy environment.
Ask your IT admin to turn on Allow transcription in your Teams policy and you’re good to go.
How to start Teams transcription
1. Start the meeting.
2. Go the meeting controls and select More actions.
3. Choose Start transcription.
Active filtering with @mentions
It can sometimes feel overwhelming to see several notifications popping up in your Chat and not knowing whether its urgent or even relevant to you. To get a colleagues’ attention you can filter the content you see with @Mentions.
This allows you to separate your personal messages and to-do lists from other less relevant conversations. This will help you stay up to date on the right information relevant to you.
Use Tags to group people
Tags in Microsoft Teams let users quickly and easily connect with a subgroup of people on a team. You can create and assign custom tags to categorise people based on role, project, skill, or location. Let’s say you’d like to notify all your designers within your marketing department of an urgent brief that just came in from a client. You’re able to simply type @Designers in the Chat to notify the set of people assigned to this group. It’s just another level of collaboration needed when working with different subsets within departments.
Stay agile with slash commands
If you’re looking to get work done fast, slash commands are a great way to navigate Microsoft Teams. You can use them to quickly set your status to online or away.
Some of the best slash commands include:
/Files – Shows the most recent files shared with you on Teams.
/GoTo – Lets you jump straight to a channel
/Call – Initiates a call with someone else on Teams
/Help – Delivers assistance via T-bot
/Saved – Takes you to your saved messages
Type / into the Search bar at the top Teams to see other options.
Use Breakout rooms to create smaller groups in a meeting
If you’re in a larger group meeting and want attendees to split out into smaller focus groups and teams, break out rooms are a great way of doing this, especially when you’re aiming to brainstorm and spark lively conversation with colleagues.
Here’s instructions on how to set up a breakout room.
How to create a breakout room in 6 easy steps
1. Start the meeting.
2. The meeting organiser will visit the meeting controls, select Breakout rooms.
3. Select the number of rooms you want (50 max), and whether you want Teams to assign participants to rooms (automatically) or you want to choose the people for each room yourself (manually).
4. Select Create Rooms.
5. Begin to assign participants to breakout rooms if you had selected the manual option and rename the various rooms. You’ll also be able to add additional participants who joined the meeting late.
6. Once your rooms are setup, select Start Rooms and participants will be taken to their breakout rooms to collaborate.
Sharing ideas with MS Teams whiteboard
One of the things ‘missing’ from a digital meeting is the easy collaboration and visualisation offered by a physical whiteboard. Being able to draw out ideas on the fly is something hard to replicate online but with MS Teams whiteboard, making collaboration in your meetings better than ever.
How to use MS Teams whiteboard
1. Within your meeting, open the meeting chat.
2. Click on Whiteboard tab.
Use it to write, draw, change colour and erase your discussion points. There is no limit to the size of the canvas and therefore the canvas can be zoomed and panned around for easier navigation.
During a meeting in progress, the whiteboard can be shared using the share button we discussed above – which places the focus on the whiteboard so is ideal when presenting or doing live collaboration.
Using Wikis to work better as a team
Each channel in Microsoft Teams has a Wiki page that participants in the channel can use to refer to documents and notes so you never need to struggle to find a file you need to access quickly. Wikis are great for meetings too, where everyone has access to the documents being referred to along with the agenda and any additional notes taken during the meeting.
Click on the “…” left-hand menu and select the Wiki option. You’ll be taken to the Wiki home page on your Personal tab, where you can take notes and check information. You can also click the All tab for a summary of every Wiki you’re involved with.
Wikis can be a great way to share information for project in channels with others in your business.
You can also add notes to your Personal Wiki wherever you are. Just type /Wiki into the Teams text box and type up your note.
Collaboration with Microsoft Teams
With so many great features on offer, Microsoft Teams is by far the best way to collaborate through chat, video calls and Teams calling to help your team work better than ever remotely. Now is the perfect time to begin harnessing the power of Teams and other Microsoft app integrations. Here at Windsor Telecom we are passionate about Microsoft 365 and Teams and can help you build a better, more effective online workspace. Get in touch to learn more.
What’s new in Microsoft Teams for 2023 18th January 2023In January 2022 Microsoft announced they’d reached over 270 million active users of their Teams platform, making it the most popular business communications service in the world.Read More
