What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a tool within the Office 365 collaboration platform. Its functionality combines a teams channel, an Office 365 group, a SharePoint team site, document storage, and more.
A Microsoft Teams instance can be personalized to the initiatives and setup of your team members. Even though the tool has been available for many years it picked up adoption around 2017 when Microsoft incorporated calling ability formerly only available on Skype for Business.
With Microsoft Teams, you can work together with teammates, share files, communicate, and leverage all the Microsoft Office 365 power apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive for business, OneNote, SharePoint, and Outlook.
Why use Microsoft Teams instead of SharePoint?
Truth be told, SharePoint is a component of Microsoft Teams. When you build a workspace, a SharePoint Online site comes with it. With Microsoft Teams, you receive all the features you love about SharePoint along with the collaboration tools that are provided by Teams.
In previous stages of Teams, you needed to download the Teams client to open information which impeded guest collaboration. With Teams now fully web-based collaboration is simplified and anyone can access content from anywhere.
5 facts to support using Microsoft Teams over SharePoint:
UX
Microsoft Teams was built with all the aspects of teamwork and delivers friendly experience for end users.
User Organization
With Microsoft Teams, it's super simple to give new team members with permissions to appropriate rooms, features, and shared workspaces. SharePoint can be complex if entry needs to be separated within the SharePoint document library.
Collaboration
Both private and group instant messaging channels are accessible to enhance team collaboration. This defeats the requirement for Skype for Business and is not an included feature in SharePoint. Slack can also be integrated if you desire.
A Single Integrated Interface
With Teams, you can leverage chat, email, information sharing features within the same system with drag and drop features and context-sensitive navigation.
Channel Conversations
Within a business, there may be several different work efforts. As an example, marketing could be working on several initiatives at once with not all teammates being involved in all efforts. Channels lets you to silo these channels while also avoiding duplication should a subject be appropriate for more than one channel.
Next Steps
Microsoft has endeavored to create documentation to support organizations get started with Teams, and is accessible for all licenses from Business Essentials through Enterprise E1, E3, and E5.
Knowing that organization adoption is integral to the success of any rollout, Microsoft has created guidance here.
A more thorough implementation plan is also available here.
Assistance for migrating to Teams is also available via the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT).
Microsoft has also obtained Mover.io as of October 2019 and has incorporated those connectors to their migration tools.