Introduction to Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a centralised hub for communication and collaboration within a team, department or student group, allowing you to share content and access other apps.

Microsoft Teams integrates directly with all Microsoft 365 applications such as SharePoint and Planner, making it easy for you to communicate and collaborate securely wherever you are with students and staff.

  • Collaborate - work with your team in real-time enabling you to edit documents and discuss ideas collaboratively
  • Group Chat - send instant messages to your team
  • Online Virtual Meetings - host or join and collaborate with Virtual Meetings
  • Share - your screen, PowerPoint Presentation, running programs, interactive whiteboard and more with other people
  • Audio/Video Calls - make high-quality audio calls with an individual or a group of colleagues
  • File Storage and file sharing - Official university file storage
  • Assignments - support and discuss an appointment with a student group

In this article

Features of teams

  • Create Teams and channels for tracking projects, conversations, files, and meetings
  • Chat with text, audio, video, and file sharing
  • Store all your files, docs, and more in one place
  • Schedule meetings that automatically integrate with your existing Outlook calendar
  • Meet with up to 250 people at the same time
  • Share your desktop, applications, or a whiteboard during meetings
  • Automatically record and upload video, audio, and shared content from meetings to Microsoft Stream
  • Presence indication based on each person's Teams activity, manual status settings, and Outlook calendar
  • Integrate your favourite apps - Planner, Trello, GitHub, and many more

How Teams can help you work together

Chat-based team workspaces

  • Chat instantly with peers and colleagues from on or off-campus
  • Quickly get in touch using video calls
  • Create teams to organise your files, tasks and projects
  • Customise your Team workspace to fit your needs

Desktop and mobile apps

  • Stay connected from your Windows or Mac computer, or on the go with the Android and iOS mobile apps
  • Configure your notifications, so you never miss a message or project update

Integrated Office apps and OneDrive

  • Work together on documents with integrated Microsoft 365 apps, like Word and Excel
  • Easily access and share files from your OneDrive account, right from the app

Accessing Teams

  • How can Microsoft Teams be accessed?

Department Team Sites

Information Technology offers IT-Supported Department Team Sites for long-term file storage of department shared files. These department Teams site are the official repository of departmental information. It is required and expected that all university-owned documents will be properly stored in the appropriate Team.

NOTE:University-owned files are prohibited from people stored on other cloud-based solutions (e.g. Box.com, Google Drive, etc.). All files should not be kept on a local machine (desktop/laptop/etc.) long term and should be backed-up to Teams as soon as possible. 

Training and support resources

Interactive Demo

Videos

More guides from Microsoft

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