Microsoft Teams, released in 2017, is a communication platform that evolved from Microsoft's Skype for Business. In a single platform, Teams integrates most of the services included in Microsoft 365 and offers the perfect solution for chat, video calling, and file storage, while still providing extensibility endpoints that allow anyone to build business processes and applications inside Microsoft Teams.
This Microsoft Teams book is for power users and business professionals looking to use Teams to improve collaboration in an enterprise environment. It will also be useful to Microsoft 365 administrators interested in implementing Microsoft Teams effectively by gaining knowledge and picking up expert tips and best practices to ensure good governance.
Chapter 1, Microsoft Teams Basics, enumerates each individual element of Microsoft Teams. These are the key concepts that you need to get to grips with in order to understand how to use the platform. The chapter also explains the other platforms from Microsoft 365 that are used when a team is created in Teams. This helps you understand how things are connected inside the Microsoft ecosystem, and how they are exposed and made available in a single location inside Microsoft Teams.
Chapter 2, Microsoft Teams' Core Features, covers all the default features that exist in Microsoft Teams out of the box. It provides a detailed explanation of all the features, including search, filters, commands, and the calendar, and explains where the data generated by each of the features is stored.
Chapter 3, How to Use Microsoft Teams: Chats and Conversation, explains the base features that make Microsoft Teams one of the best collaboration platforms on the market. It goes through all the details associated with the chat feature for 1:1 and team chats.
Chapter 4, How to Use Microsoft Teams: Meetings, Webinars, and Live Events, covers meeting functionalities in detail, from scheduling to sharing screens. It also gets into the admin options for enabling meeting features for guest users, such as remote control during a meeting. It covers the available options – Webinars and Live Events – for organizing events for a broader audience of up to 10,000 attendees.
Chapter 5, Private vs Public vs Shared: Teams and Channels, covers teams and channels and the levels of privacy that can be defined for each. It highlights the differences between public, private, and shared channels and dives into the details of the architecture with scenarios that help you to understand when to use each one.
Chapter 6, Teams Templates, covers the templating feature available in Microsoft Teams for end users and administrators. With Microsoft Teams templates, your organization will speed up the creation of new teams while maintaining consistency across them.
Chapter 7, Employee Experience in Microsoft Teams Using Microsoft Viva, covers the new employee experience suite of products available from Microsoft Teams. In this chapter, you will get an overview of Viva Connections, Viva Learning, Viva Insights, and Viva Topics, with a detailed explanation of how each one will help you to keep your life at work balanced and organized.
Chapter 8, Other Microsoft Teams Use Cases, covers the use of dedicated versions of Microsoft Teams built for education, frontline workers, and even Microsoft Teams for friends and family. In this chapter, you will also get familiar with the hardware available to make your experience of Microsoft Teams events better.
Chapter 9, Extending Microsoft Teams Using Apps, introduces Microsoft Teams apps and teaches you how the platform can be extended using the six different types of apps.
Chapter 10, Extending Microsoft Teams Using Custom Apps and Microsoft 365, covers even more ways to extend the platform. Even though Microsoft Teams offers an app store, it will probably not be enough for most businesses. Large organizations each have their own business processes that won't be catered for exactly by standard products. This chapter guides you on how to enable and install custom apps on Microsoft Teams.
Chapter 11, Building Your Own App for Microsoft Teams Using the Developer Portal, covers Microsoft Teams developer portal, a ''development'' app that empowers any end user to build their own custom apps for Microsoft Teams.
Chapter 12, Building Your Own Bot for Microsoft Teams, covers the creation of bots, powerful automated agents that will help you to accomplish daily tasks in an efficient way using natural language. Even though it sounds futuristic and complex, building a bot is accessible to everyone and does not require code. This chapter includes a step-by-step guide to creating and deploying a bot on Microsoft Teams.
Chapter 13, Microsoft Teams PowerShell: A Tool for Automation, explores PowerShell. Microsoft Teams admins will end up doing repetitive tasks to create and configure teams; this chapter introduces the PowerShell modules available for the platform that allow the automation of tasks.
To get the most out of this book, you should have a Microsoft Teams account (free or business) and you should have the application installed on your computer and mobile phones.
The final chapter of the book covers the use of PowerShell, which requires the installation of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module.
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Software covered in the book |
OS requirements |
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Microsoft Teams |
Windows, macOS X, or Linux Android or iOS |
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Microsoft Teams PowerShell module |
Windows |
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Microsoft-Teams-Second-Edition). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying/pasting of code.
The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Microsoft-Teams-Second-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781801075275_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: ''Select System info from the Administration panel.''
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example; "We loop through all these owners and compare them with the email defined in $teamOwnerEmail."
A block of code is set as follows:
$winVersion = Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem
$psVersion = Get-Host | Select-Object Version
Write-Host "This computer is running:"
Write-Host ("Windows {0} – Build {1}"-f $winVersion.Version, $winVersion.BuildNumber)
Write-Host ("PowerShell {0}.{1}" -f $psVersion.Version.Major, $psVersion.Version.Minor)
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Get-Team -DisplayName "Project X"
Important notes and real-life Microsoft Teams scenarios appear like this.
Pro tips appear like this.
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
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