What is Microsoft Teams?
Released in November 2016, Teams is a chat-based collaboration tool that provides global, remote, and dispersed teams with the ability to work together and share information via a common space. You can utilize cool features like document collaboration, one-on-one chat, team chat, and more. Microsoft Teams is also fully integrated with many other Office 365 services, such as Skype, Planner, Groups, SharePoint, Exchange, and Yammer.
From a security perspective Microsoft Teams provides the enterprise security and compliance features you expect from Office 365, including eDiscovery and legal hold for channels, chats and files. Available in 181 markets and 19 languages, Microsoft Teams encrypts data at all times, at-rest and in-transit, and includes multi-factor authentication to enhance identity protection. More on this later.
At Akins, we love the integration with Planner, which we use to manage tasks and milestones involved in a project we are executing. We have eliminated a lot of the email hunting that goes on when a reference or prior communication needs to be reviewed by a team member. Everything around the project is stored centrally.
From the official release blog below, pay close attention to the security compliant nature of Teams…
First – It’s all about the Teams
First and foremost, Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversation experience for today’s teams. Microsoft Teams supports not only persistent but also threaded chats to keep everyone engaged. Team conversations are, by default, visible to the entire team, but there is of course the ability for private discussions. Skype is deeply integrated, so teams can participate in voice and video conferences. And everyone can add personality to their digital workspace with emojis, stickers, GIFs and custom memes to make it their own.
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Second – A hub for teamwork
Second, Microsoft Teams brings together the full breadth and depth of Office 365 to provide a true hub for teamwork. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are all built into Microsoft Teams so people have all the information and tools they need at their fingertips. Backed by the Microsoft Graph, intelligent services are surfaced throughout the workspace to help with information relevancy, discovery and sharing. Microsoft Teams is also built on Office 365 Groups—our cross-application membership service that makes it easy for people to move naturally from one collaboration tool to another, preserve their sense of context and share with others.

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