Microsoft Teams is the online platform to enable teamwork. It offers your employees – and any guest users – a safe and user-friendly environment for collaboration and communication. Many organizations have accelerated the roll-out of Teams because of corona, especially for video calling and online meetings. But the tool can do much more than that: Teams offers everything you need in a digital environment to do your work and streamline collaboration with Microsoft Consulting Firm.

In this blog we list the most important Microsoft Teams functionalities in Teams for you. With these tips you get even more benefit from the platform with Microsoft Consulting Firm.

Microsoft Teams: An Integrated Collaboration Platform



The goal of Microsoft Teams is to make digital teamwork as simple and efficient as possible. It facilitates a modern, flexible way of working, where employees can work (together) at any location and on any device. Teams works on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones and on almost every operating system.

Communication is of course very important in teamwork, which is why Microsoft Teams offers many useful functionalities for (video) calling, online meetings, chatting and sharing files. But the biggest advantage is that you can integrate all other Office 365 tools and many third-party apps. So you always have everything within reach. Continuous switching is no longer necessary and finding and sharing information is also a lot faster. This not only saves time, but also ensures that everyone is always working with the latest versions and updates.

With Teams, you have instant access to:

  • Team members and projects
  • Calling, chatting and meeting online
  • Relevant information and activities
  • Documents and Notes
  • Schedules and To-Do Lists
  • All other Office 365 tools
  • A handy search functionality
  • That makes Microsoft Teams the core of your digital workplace .

The most important Microsoft Teams functionalities at a glance

So how do you take advantage of all those useful solutions and benefits that Microsoft Teams has to offer? Below we briefly explain the most important Microsoft Teams functionalities.

1. Create teams, channels and tabs

Within Microsoft Teams you can create different 'teams' to work together. For example for a specific project or department. Within such a virtual team you can chat, work on documents, share content, call, meet and create schedules and tasks.

In a team you can create different channels for specific topics. By adding tabs within a channel, you can link to other Office 365 apps , third-party solutions, specific files, or sites. This way, your team has all relevant apps and information in one place and you can work with it directly from Teams.

With the default settings, anyone in your organization can create new teams, channels, and tabs. Therefore, make sure that you do not get a proliferation of teams within your organization. Make clear agreements about creating, organizing and managing teams and channels and record these in a governance plan .

2. Chat and communicate

The chat function is actually the foundation of Microsoft Teams ; the platform was originally designed as a chat tool. What makes Teams special is that you can create multiple chat channels per team or project, for example for different topics or activities. This helps you to keep an overview.

An advantage of posting and replying to messages via Teams compared to mail is that all responses are clearly arranged and not fragmented in a mailbox. Conversations are threaded, so that all team members can also see previous messages. And with the @-mention function you can alert individual team members or your entire team to a message, they will then receive a notification. You can also find messages quickly via the search function.

This makes Microsoft Teams much more efficient than sending individual emails and attachments with everyone in the CC. Such e-mails are often much less well read and followed up. In addition, it can be difficult to find emails and replies to messages quickly, even if you organize them into folders.

In addition, Teams allows you to quickly and easily share files by adding them to the chat and then discussing them directly in the chat or via a Teams meeting. You no longer have to share files from different tools and solutions and send them as attachments via email. This not only saves time, but also prevents your colleagues from overlooking important attachments.