With Microsoft Tasks in Teams, you can create, assign, edit, and update tasks. You can also attach documents to your tasks, including presentations (.pptx), spreadsheets (.xlsx), word documents (.docx), photos (.jpg or .png), videos (.mp4), and more. Your tasks are available on all the devices you use with Microsoft Teams. This includes Windows, Android smartphones and tablets, iPhones, iPads, Macs, and PCs.
Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace where you can bring together people, conversations, and tools to get your work done. Whether you’re sharing a document, brainstorming in a meeting, or making plans for the weekend, everything just flows seamlessly.
Only Teams gives you lightweight chat and Lync-like meetings in a single app—so you can increase your team’s productivity and collaboration with high-fidelity digital experiences.
Video Apps (Stream and YouTube)
Microsoft Stream is an app that allows you to view and share pre-recorded videos from members of your organization. It’s a great way to facilitate town halls, training, and other company events. At AvePoint, for instance, we recap all the wins and losses from our weekly lunch and learns in Stream so those who couldn’t make the meeting will be able to access that content later on.
Another option that you might want to consider is YouTube. You might ask, “Why would I want to enable YouTube in my internal portal where business is supposed to be done?” Well, say you need video training for something your organization doesn’t cover. Content on YouTube can be a viable option and integrating the YouTube app is a way for you to quickly reference that information as opposed to going out of your way to look up a video or playlist. Having reference material at your fingertips right in Teams will keep you focused and make sharing with internal teams that much easier.
Trello – Organize & prioritize your projects
Trello is a project management tool whose boards, cards, and lists can help you organize your projects flexibly. When added to Teams, you’ll be able to see all your boards directly from the app without going to a web browser. By integrating into Teams, you can see your Trello assignments, tasks, and notifications and have conversations about them. The process of adding a Trello app to your Teams is quick and easy as Trello comes as a default app for Microsoft Teams.
The app will send notifications when your team member creates or removes a card, assigns you to a specific card, and comments or adds an attachment to the card. That way, you ensure everyone is up to date without having to check for updates manually. Trello is a fun and free way to bring together project management and project collaboration without leaving the Teams app.
Karma
Karma is an app that allows you to give “kudos” to your fellow employees. We used this at the beginning of our journey into Microsoft Teams to help promote good behavior and habits. Think of it as an internal scoreboard where people can give each other points and move up the leaderboards.
From replying to the correct thread in a channel to applauding a successful presentation, the important thing is making people feel recognized in the workplace. Receiving positive feedback via Karma can also lead to increased Microsoft Teams adoption overall. This is probably the second most worthwhile app you should start implementing (right after Polly).
ScrumGenius – Automate daily standups
ScrumGenius is an app that will automate your team status meetings. It’s an easy way to automate your daily status meetings, weekly retrospectives, and one-on-one check-ins by running automatic check-ins and stand-ups. Every day at a set time, it asks team members a series of questions on what they accomplished yesterday, what their tasks are for today, and what blockers they encountered. ScrumGenius will then email a summary of the team’s results to team leaders so they have a record of what happened each day.
The @scrumgenius bot collects the updates from your team, records the answers, produces useful statistics and summaries, and broadcasts live updates to your channel. It’s a perfect solution for those who want to avoid unproductive meeting sessions.
Wiki
The last app that I’d like to mention is one of the default apps included when you create a channel. I feel like this app doesn’t get enough love and, full disclosure, I didn’t understand what the point of it was when I first got introduced to Teams, so I deleted it. After I began using Teams more and more, however, I came to understand the distinct benefits of the Wiki app.
If you already have a dedicated place to keep notes for teams and best practices, that’s perfectly fine. However, Teams are often created for one-off projects with two disparate groups coming together that might need a full OneNote to really collaborate efficiently.
To that effect, the Wiki app is a lightweight way to do a couple of things. It’s a quick way for us to have what’s essentially an easy how-to guide. If two teams need to work on a particular process but have to follow basic rules of engagement, the Wiki app is a great place to iron out the rules everyone needs to follow in one central, easily accessible location.
The Wiki app also comes in handy for Team FAQs. This is especially good if you have a team that needs to stay up to date. Perhaps you’re working through a certification process want to be sure everyone understands the correct messaging. Instead of simply highlighting it in a channel message, the Wiki app can be used as a central knowledge repository.
Lastly, though it’s fairly obvious, you can also use it as what the name implies: a very simple, stripped-down Wiki. Having more of your traditional Wikipedia-type content there can turn it into a great lightweight resource if you don’t need a full-on OneNote page or SharePoint Wiki app. So before automatically deleting it, consider if you need a light reference point in any of the Teams you manage.
AttendanceBot – Track & analyze work hours
AttendanceBot is an app that helps you track vacations, paid time off, employee shift planning, sick days, remote work, and hours. It’s especially helpful for remote teams with simple ‘in’ and ‘out’ messages, clock in and out. It allows you to keep track of your work hours and export timesheets right within Microsoft Teams. You can track the time spent on specific projects and clients and visualize all data on a dashboard.
Just mention @attendancebot in messages like ‘PTO today’ or ‘Vacation from July 2 to July 9’. It will send your request for approval, notify you of its status, put it on your calendar, and set up vacation autoresponders. AttendanceBot takes care of attendance and leaves management without wasting your time while keeping you in the loop with your team members.
MyHub
There’s no better way to keep track of and organize all your Teams than MyHub. MyHub gives users an easy interface through which to sort and organize their Teams, Groups, SharePoint sites, and Yammer Communities while making it much easier to access the content associated with each workspace. Workspaces can be created right from within the app, and Team owners can manage membership, handle requests, and much more.
AtBot + PowerAutomate
The AtBot is a powerful no-code chatbot solution that makes it super easy to create a logic-based chatbot! When you incorporate this ability with PowerAutomate, AtBot can be empowered to automate a wide variety of tasks while adding a productivity boost to your teams! You can help simplify productivity for your users with your own process chatbot in no time!
Polly – Get live feedback from your team
Polly is a survey app that lets you create surveys in your Microsoft Teams channel or group chat. It offers a simple way for your teammates to vote on a specific question quickly. The only thing you need to do is provide questions and answers, and Polly does the vote-counting analytics for you in real-time. Simply mention @polly to create and send your survey, and watch the results appear.
It also allows advanced options for extra customization like anonymity, scheduling, displaying or hiding results, and multiple votes. If you want to hear what your colleagues have to say, turn on comments, and an easy-to-use discussion board will appear. Any department can use it to keep employees engaged with the company’s everyday activities, such as – when to have a meeting or where to go for lunch? By adding the Polly tab, you can reach colleagues in context without distracting them from their tasks.
Conclusion
Microsoft teams are one of the most popular communication tools used by companies, organizations, and educational institutions across the world. Its simple and sleek interface is easy to use and optimized for productivity. As organizations shifted to remote work, there was an immediate search for collaboration platforms for employees and managers. As a tried and proven collaboration tool, companies across industries were quick to adopt Microsoft Teams.
While MS Teams has a lot of features and collaboration tools for smooth communication with your teammates, to get the most out of it, you can bring in added functionality with Microsoft Teams apps. Teams have a wide range of apps, for everything from attendance management and productivity to team building and event management. These apps are specifically designed for different tasks and with them, you can exploit the complete potential of Microsoft Teams.