Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform that provides document sharing, online meetings and more to help your people to work together.

Most businesses use Microsoft Office. Microsoft Teams has been designed to work well within that ecosystem.

Microsoft Teams is user-friendly and helps to drive collaboration across different offices or between remote workers. The chat-based functionality helps teams of people to work together, share ideas and ask questions without clogging up their email inbox. The system lends itself to online meetings, document sharing and document storage (in SharePoint). Teams is also set up to facilitate online video calling, online meetings, screen sharing and even online training sessions. The Teams system is separated into four categories:

Teams – this is where you find and create channels which are effectively conversations or chats between teammates. You can also share files with colleagues.

Meetings – this is where you can view your meetings for the day or week ahead. Its calendar syncs with Outlook and you can also schedule a meeting from this part of the system.

Calls – users can make and receive phone calls using a headset or their computer’s microphone and speakers. Calls to other Microsoft Teams (and Skype) users are free. If you want to be able to make calls to phone numbers, you can purchase a calling plan.

Activities – users can catch up on their messages, alerts and project updates in the Activities section.

There are two ways you can get a Microsoft Teams account. One is to sign up for a free account, (which requires a Microsoft account), and the other is to have a Microsoft Office 365 Business or Enterprise account, where the app is included.

To sign up for a free Teams account, users can have any kind of Microsoft account or ID, such as a login for Outlook.com.

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