During the year, it is clear that most organizations have adopted a telework system with Microsoft Consulting firm. With this new working environment, having a great platform where the team can collaborate with ease is essential. Microsoft Teams has been one of the most widely used video conferencing tools and team collaboration systems in large corporations and universities. As of October 2020, Teams had 115 million daily active users who call, chat, and share files.
With such numbers, Microsoft Teams has certainly proven its reliability when it comes to collaboration, communication and virtual meetings. However, besides its main functions, there are a lot of ( somewhat hidden! ) things you need to know to take full advantage of this tool. This article will give you some shortcuts and practical tips to have a more efficient experience!
1. Messaging
This feature is not necessarily hidden, but it is not necessarily used too often. The default dialog gives you a field to enter a new message, but when you click the ” A ” icon, it lets you create a message that you can bold, italicize, underline, strikethrough, and highlight text, among other features! This is the best solution when you want to add a bold title in your post or highlight certain details. If you want your message to be neat and formal, this feature is for you!
2. Search Bar Commands
Do you ever need to find a message or file in Teams but can’t find it? Or do you want to navigate faster in Teams in general? Luckily, there’s a set of commands you can perform with the Microsoft Teams search bar to make your experience easier. From checking your activity to changing your status, you can perform these tasks easily. Even if your mouse and touchpad are not working, you can just type CTRL+/ to perform these functions. Here are some examples :
To view your activity, type /activity
Type /available to become available or /away to revert to being away. Some of the other commands for your status are /brb , /busy , and /dnd to get back soon , busy , and do not disturb , respectively.
To quickly chat with someone without having to search for them in your contacts list, type /chat and then the name of the person you want to chat with. You can even type your message in the search bar!
3. Flag your messages
If you want your users or teammates to notice your most important conversations and make sure they read your message, you can tag it so they know about it.
Before sending your message, be sure to label them first according to your preferences. If you mark your message as important, it will be marked as such and encourage your recipient to prioritize it.
On the other hand, for a message marked as Urgent, your recipient will receive a notification every 2 minutes for a total of 20 minutes or until they read it. Be sure to use this feature professionally and appropriately, as it may flood your recipient’s notifications. Mark your posts accordingly!
One more: Open the conversation in another window
You can open an ongoing conversation in an external window so you can continue doing something else in Teams while keeping the conversation open. To do this, hover the mouse pointer over the conversation you want to open in another window and click the arrow icon below.
Microsoft Teams continues to be one of the best team collaboration tools and these handy features will definitely allow users to enjoy the best experience on the platform while enabling more effective team collaboration.
