Get Started with Microsoft Teams

Overview

Microsoft Teams is a unifying experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Microsoft Office 365 global, secure cloud. This article will help you learn more about what Microsoft Teams is, how to use it, and how it will benefit you in your daily computing needs.

 

What materials do I need?

  • Mac, or Windows computer running the latest OS
  • Android, or iOS based mobile device with the most recent updates

 

How do I use this technology?

The following core capabilities are included in Teams:

  • Chat: Enjoy public and private conversations with your teams. Integration of video brings popular social features, such as adding emojies and custom memes to your discussion.
  • Audio & Video Calling: Teams provides a simple and easy-to-use app that allows you to chat with your team via text, have a voice conversation, or a video meeting. Attendees can share their screen and text chat within the meeting.
  • Schedule meetings: Easily schedule meetings for your team.
  • Record a meeting: Easily record your meetings in Teams to capture audio, video, and screen sharing activity. The video is saved within Microsoft Stream, so you can share it securely across the university.
  • Manage Schedules: With Shifts, your schedule management tool in Teams, managers can easily plan and create shift schedules, and team members can review schedules and make schedule change requests, all in real time.
  • Files: Teams creates a SharePoint document library for each channel to provide many options for working collaboratively. Beyond simply editing and sharing files, you can select a file and start a new Conversation about it which appear in your Team Channel Conversations tab so other members of your Team can view your comments and replies. File conversations are different from Microsoft Word track changes and comments and are not embedded in the document, conversations are only visible within Teams.
  • Hub: Teams offers a shared workspace for various applications in Microsoft Office including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Planner, OneNote, SharePoint, Delve, and Power BI. These features gives you and your team the option to work natively without having to stress about toggling between applications as you try to get projects completed.
  • Praise: Send digital badges to people in recognition of their efforts either directly via chat, or for wider recognition send it in a channel conversation.
  • Bots: There are currently about 24 bots with a variety of functionalities available to help increase productivity. There’s the T-Bot, which can answer most basic and frequently asked questions about Teams, Polly Bot for polling co-workers, Statsbot for delivering scheduled reports via sources, such as Salesforce and Google Analytics, and Growbot, which allows the exchange of kudos with your co-workers.
  • Highly Customizable: Every team is unique with differing workflow methods and requirements. Microsoft Teams allows you to tailor your team and channels to meet each groups needs. Enable modules to provide updates and notifications from third-party services like BitBucket, GitHub, and Twitter, among others. Make accessing other Office 365 services such as Forms, OneNote, Planner, Power BI, and Stream just a click of a tab away.

 

How do I access Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft teams is accessible via web browsers, as well as desktop and mobile client applications. You may find yourself using one, or more of these options as you stay engaged with your team.

The best way to get familiar with teams and channels is to install the Teams app, login with your UA email address, pick a team and channel and start exploring!

 

Get Microsoft Teams on all your devices

The Microsoft Teams downloads page provides a convenient place where you can download Desktop Apps for Mac & Windows as well as Mobile Apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.

 

Start using Microsoft Teams

  1. Start Teams.
    • In Windows, click Start > Microsoft Corporation > Microsoft Teams.
    • On mobile, tap the Teams icon.
    • On Mac, go to the Applications folder and double-click Microsoft Teams.
  2. Sign in with your UA email address (UaUsername@alaska.edu) and password.

 

Additional Information

Use the help resources listed below to learn how to successfully use Microsoft Teams.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a Team and a Channel?

A team is a collection of people, conversations, files, and tools – all in one place. A channel is a discussion within a team dedicated to a department, project, or topic.

 

Need additional help or have issues

For additional assistance contact the IT Services Technical Support Center via phone at (907) 786-4646, toll-free at (877) 633-3888, email us at uaa.techsupport@alaska.edu.

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