There are three types of chat in Microsoft Teams.

1. One-on-one chats: to connect with people individually.

2. Group chats: to speak with a group of people at the same time.

3. Meeting chats: to ask a question without interrupting the speaker.

Many of you must be aware of these and use all three types of chat, but there are other features to chat that you may not be aware of, which we will discuss in this blog.

Start a Chat

To start a chat, click on the ‘Chat’ from the left navigation and select ‘New chat ’ to add then type in the name with whom you want to chat. You can also start a one-on-one chat from someone’s profile card. Open it by choosing their picture in a channel or by using search.

Once you’ve selected New chat and entered a person’s name, compose your message in the box at the bottom of the chat. To open formatting options, select Format beneath the box where you type your message.

Delivery Options

By clicking the ‘!’ button beneath the message while sending a conversation to an individual or small group, you can choose from three delivery choices. The possibilities are as follows:

1. Standard: The message will be delivered in the usual manner.

2. Important: The message’s title will be ‘Important,’ coupled with an exclamation icon.

3. Urgent: In addition to the headline being ‘Urgent,’ the receiver will be notified every 2 minutes for the next 20 minutes.

Posts in a channel have only one delivery option: ‘Important,’ with the same formatting as conversations.

Pin/Unpin chat

A conversation can be pinned or muted in the same way that we do in channels. To pin a conversation just hover over it and click on the ellipses ‘…’ and select pin.

The pinned conversation can be seen at the top, and to view the conversation in chat or unpin click on the ellipses ‘…’

Mark as unread

Mark a message as unread if you don’t have time to respond right away.

Save Messages

You can also save the messages by clicking on the ellipses and selecting ‘Save this Message’.

Messages you’ve saved are saved in your profile (accessed via your picture in the top right-hand corner).

Replying to a specific message

Within a conversation, users will be able to respond to individual messages in one of two ways. They may select “Reply” from the list after hovering over a message and clicking the ellipsis menu (…). Users may also right-click on a chat message and then select “Reply” from the context menu.

Create a task from the message

With the ability to create a task directly from a message in Teams, you can capture that important thought, to do item, or comment before it slips away. Convert any message into a task with the click of a button, and without the need for an additional app. Hover your mouse over any message in a Teams conversation and select the ellipses (…). On the pop-out menu choose More actions > Create task

In the new window, fill in the specifics of your assignment in the new window and adjust the parameters to match your requirements. The task will be put according to the Create in option.

a. If you choose Tasks, this will add the task to a To-Do list.

b. If you choose a plan name, the task will be added to a Planner plan.

With either selection, the task will also show up in the chat so others can see it too.

Share chat and channel conversations to outlook

You can send a copy of a chat and channel conversations as an email to Outlook from within Teams. Right-click on the message and select ‘Share to Outlook’

Choose the recipient, you can also add attachments or customize the message and then click ‘Send’ to share your chat.

Note: The Share to Outlook feature is currently not supported on mobile.

Final thoughts

In this blog, we have seen a few basic but very important features of the chat in Microsoft Teams. We think this might help you in a day of life with Teams. If you need any further assistance or if you need someone who can help you in the adoption of Microsoft Teams for your organization please email us at contact@beyondintranet.com

Initially, Microsoft will provide 13 base templates based on tasks like managing a project, promoting an event, or coordinating incident responses. The base templates have a predefined team structure with set channels, tabs, and apps; they can be duplicated but not edited.

Currently, a team has many capabilities and most of these are supported by team templates but not all. Below I share what capabilities these templates do and do not support.

Supported capabilities

a. Base template type
b. Team name
c. Team description
d. Team visibility (public or private)
e. Team settings (e.g., member, guest, @mentions)
f. Auto-favorite channel
g. Installed app
h. Pinned tabs

Not supported capabilities

a. Team membership
b. Team Picture
c. Channel settings
d. Connectors
e. Files and content

The remaining capabilities will be added to the templates in future updates.

New templates and their properties

Microsoft created templates based on specific industry needs.  These templates include priority apps that are available on the app source. Initially, Microsoft will publish 13 templates spanning key business scenarios and industries so users can get more from using Teams.

It will be possible to extend or override certain special templates with additional properties based on your specific needs. However, some base template types contain properties that can’t be changed.

The following are the templates and their properties.

Template limitations

Team templates have some limitations in terms of channels, tabs, and apps.

How to create a team from templates

1. Click on Teams from the left navigation on your MS Teams client.

2. At the bottom of the teams’ list, click Join, or create a team.

3. Now, click on the ‘Create a team’

Note: If you don’t see the Create a new team option, you may not have the necessary permissions to create your teams.

4. A new window will pop up, select any template under ‘Select from template’. As you can see below, we selected the ‘Contoso Events Management’ template.

5. Once you select the template, it shows you the team templates’ structure (channels and apps).

6. You can customize the team name, description, and channel names in a template.

7. After you create the team, users receive guidance on how to best use and further customize the team. Each template comes with its instruction manual.

When this will be released?

Microsoft will begin rolling this out in the first week of October. They expect to finish the rollout by the end of October.

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Teams is a great platform to collaborate with everyone in your organization. The new templates provide a basic structure for a team for those who are not sure how to get the most out of this platform.

If you have any questions about the Teams templates or any other aspect of implementing Teams for your organization, contact us today for a free consultation.

Thanks to advanced communication and collaboration tools available in today’s digital workplace, people can now work anywhere they choose.

There is always communication between teams, but physical proximity is no longer necessary for them to function well.

Remote Employment is the Work of the Future

Even though it’s unlikely that brick-and-mortar workplaces will go away anytime soon, the rise of the telecommuting workforce is undeniable. Currently, 38% of American workers do some or all of their jobs from part. That number is only expected to grow as communication and collaboration technologies work to advance at a rapid time. Workers in remote locations may include: 

• Employees, either full-time or part-time, who perform periodic work away from the office 
• Workers that are entirely remote from their workplace environment, whether full-time or part-time 
• Freelancers, consultants, and contractors that work independently, either whole or part-time  

There are several reasons why companies that don’t offer flexible work choices struggle to compete. When companies aren’t limited by geography, they have more freedom to find and hire the greatest people. Companies are learning the hard way that giving workers more control over their schedules and working conditions results in happier, more productive workers, which positively affects the bottom line. 

There has been rapid development in the digital workplace, with sophisticated tools for communication and collaboration empowering employees to work in whichever manner and location they see fit. While it is still essential for teams to work together, physically being in the same place is no longer necessary, given the prevalence of constant connectivity.

Despite its many advantages, the remote workforce is still in its infancy, and many companies have yet to figure out how to maximize its potential for productivity and employee engagement. Collaboration software and practices that put teams in the same position to be productive and company-centric, whether at the office, at home in pajamas, or halfway around the world, are essential to the success of a remote workforce. 

This is where SharePoint comes in. SharePoint is one of the most successful enterprise-level collaboration platforms in the world. Over the past two decades, Microsoft saw SharePoint grow to over 100 million users around the world. 

Microsoft 365  SharePoint Intranet  has the tools your employees need to boost your productivity. Below we share how to get the most out of your Microsoft 365 license when you use a SharePoint-based intranet to improve productivity and communication among your remote team. 

7 Reasons why SharePoint Intranet is for Your Remote Teams

1. Clear Communication- Share news instantly and stay informed

Your corporate intranet can become a virtual hub where your team meets to communicate effectively. 

SharePoint has the features and flexibility to customize the platform to mold this to your business needs. You can choose among various plug-in and play add-ins, workflows, and other widgets for your corporate intranet page. These tools can help your remote teams instantly search, store, or secure key company data. The portal helps companies disseminate information across your organization. This helps you organize information, people, and projects. 

You can also use SharePoint Add-ins like the Employee Directory as a central directory for your organization. People can easily search for employees’ information and share their contact details, skill sets, and current project lists. You can embed the add-in on your corporate intranet to connect your staff. 

Other add-ins like News Ticker and RSS Viewer share the latest news and snippets related to your company or industry. This helps your remote teams stay informed about changes in your organization.

2. A Great Collaboration Tool

It is vital to ensure Your remote team works together as a group collaborating on projects. SharePoint helps collaborators change documents simultaneously without delay. Co-authoring is a great way to get real-time feedback on your work and ideas. 

Also, SharePoint lists serve as project management tools to help remote teams collaborate more effectively. Remote team members can review the list of outstanding tasks, check deadlines, and dependencies, and communicate accordingly with concerned team members. 

Furthermore, we developed advanced collaboration add-ins like the SharePoint Knowledge Management add-in. It is a digital repository that stores your key company information. You can use the Knowledge Management add-in to share:

• Policies and procedures
•  FAQs
• Best practices
• Document templates
• Project requirement data, etc. 

Finally, employees can ask questions in real-time. Employees who are authorized to answer get email notifications about a new question on the platform.  

Depending on the privacy of the question, the answer can be privately emailed as well as publicly published if you wish. This add-in can also be easily embedded on your corporate intranet as a widget. 

3. Central document repository

SharePoint is awesome when it comes to storing crucial documents. They have an advanced search feature to ensure users can find the data they uploaded.

With SharePoint, you can share documents and files with your remote team at any given time from wherever you are on any device you choose to use.

These documents can be in formats like Word, Excel, PDF, image, or videos. You can also set user permissions for accessing, downloading, or editing these documents thus also setting up a secured system for storage of the crucial company files.

4. Encourage ideas

Your remote team members may not be close physically,  but it is important to never underestimate their ability to work together when it comes to innovative ideas.

Your intranet is a central platform where team members can post their innovative ideas, chats, pictures and more. By sharing this information, they can build their relationship, and improve employee engagement.

5. Intranet in your pocket

As companies adopt a mobile work environment it’s increasingly important for employees to have access to business content, anywhere they work, no matter the time of day or device.

With SharePoint Mobile and SharePoint Online, you can use your device to access company data from anywhere in the world. This means you can open, review, and edit documents with colleagues even when you’re not in the office. Note: To keep this digital environment secure, it is only accessible with a specific login URL and the right credentials.

Conclusion

Remote working has become the new normal for many organizations. Because it is still new for many companies, they are learning how to master this new organizational setup.

A robust and intuitive SharePoint intranet can help your team ease into this type of work scenario. Let’s start building a connected workplace for our remote teams and boost their productivity and collaboration with the best-in-class Intranet. Check out our SharePoint Intranet Examples here or contact us today. We are here to answer any questions you have on how to set up your intranet.

Is your company information scattered all over the organization making it difficult to manage and search for the right information at the right time?
Does your support staff face difficulty in gathering the correct solution for their customer’s problems which have been addressed in past but not documented and saved properly?
Does every new employee who joins your organization find it difficult to get all of the policy documents and procedures in one place, making their first day difficult?
Or when your key employees are out of the office or leave the company, does valuable company knowledge go with them?

You can solve all these problems with one efficient knowledge-based software. Yes, we are talking about the

SharePoint based Knowledge Management solution by Beyond Intranet.

Our Knowledge Management add-in is a customized, digital library that is accessible to your employees, partners, customers or anybody else you’d like to have access permission. Users can search, share, add or access important company information whenever and wherever they want. This SharePoint based content collaboration tool can help teams adopt a modern communication strategy with which they can switch to continuous sorting, sharing and searching of knowledge in high-level security measures. This is important when streamlining your in-house critical education management system, as well as to making your customer support backbone even stronger.

Knowledge shouldn’t be stored solely on hard drives, where it can become outdated or irrelevant. Our Knowledge Management tool provides a central platform to keep your team’s work, organized, accessible, and up to date, making it easier to find the information you need to keep moving forward.

According to a study by Gartner, improving access to contextual knowledge for an employee reduces the support time by 20 to 80 percent, thus increasing the customer satisfaction rate. This also helps organizations reduce the cost of customer support by 25 percent or more when using appropriate Knowledge Management Products.

Beyond Intranet’s SharePoint based Knowledge Management enables an organization to store, create, maintain and share vital company information all within one easily accessible Knowledge portal. This portal is enriched with powerful features like:

1. Organization of data:

Easy organization of your company information into categories and subcategories such as departments, projects, individual tasks or all of them. Assign a category or subcategory administrator to manage knowledge assets, so you can easily control what is being posted and by whom.

2. Document repository:

it’s easy to save documents like text files, images, and spreadsheets. These documents can be attached to questions, answers or both. Versioning of the document is maintained to ensure the latest version is in circulation. Working as a robust document repository, this eliminates duplicate documents and helps employees maintain a single copy of the current document with all versions saved in the backend.

3. User level permissions:

User level permissions are yet another important aspect of BI’s Knowledge Management add-in. the KM administrator can create different groups of users with different role levels. Some can only view the K-assets, while others can ask questions. Category and subcategory administrators can approve and answer questions, allowing them to filter out unwanted questions and maintain company culture.

4. Robust Search Engine:

Another highly demanded feature of this tool is a robust Question and Answer search engine. This allows users to search specific keywords to pull up relevant Knowledge assets within seconds. Users can also search attached documents.

5. Personalization:

Use your company logo, theme and title to brand the KM tool and match it with your company culture.

6. The validity of K-assets:

Set expiry dates for your Knowledge assets, so they are removed when no longer needed. This takes of unnecessary loads from admins managing event based assets.

7. Automatic email notifications:

This is yet another vital feature of Beyond Intranet’s Knowledge Management. Administrators are instantly informed when a new question is posted by any employee or customer by an automated email. Similarly, staff and customers get a notification when a response to their question is sent through the portal. This helps in significantly improving delivery timelines and customer satisfaction.

8. Data Analytics:

Another highly demanded feature is reporting or Data Analytics. No software is complete if it does not show its adoption rate or statistics that managers can use to make informed business decisions. So here’s where our BI Knowledge Management tool plays a crucial role. Statistics not only show the tool’s user adoption rate, but they also provide information on which question is most asked by your customers. It allows you to understand the bottlenecks of your system and improve it.

9. Multilingual:

And Last but not least- its available in multiple languages or your own custom language. For ease of customers- we have provided 5 in-built languages like- English (United States), Dutch (Belgium), German (Germany), French (France) and Spanish (Mexico). Users can change their view of the tool in their custom language in just a few clicks.

Your organization is unique, so your Knowledge Management solution should be too. If there are specific customizations you’d like to see added to the current add-in, we’d love to hear about them! You can send your customization requests to contact@beyondintranet.com.

So, Let’s not wait and put our knowledge to work for you! Download the free trial of our Knowledge Management add-in now.