Microsoft Teams Productivity Hacks

What
It is easy to lose track of all the Teams you’re a member of – but there’s also a quick way to view all your Teams, membership types,basic analytics, and more.

Why
It is a healthy governance habit to regularly review and clean up Group, Team, Team site, and community membership. It makes navigation easier, and de-clutters your life.

How
From the Teams tab on the left nav, you’ll nee your list of current pinned channels and active Teams. At the bottom, click on the wheel icon to access the ‘Manage teams’ page.

What
Within chats, you can mark messages as urgent, alerting the user every two minutes until they look at your message.

Why
Modern life is all about instant gratification, isn’t it? But seriously, with so much content and so many conversations throughout the day, sometimes you need a digital flamethrower to cut through the noise.

How
Within your chat, type your message and before hitting return/send, select the exclamation icon and set the urgency level of your message. Then hit send, and your message will appear with a red header and desktop alert.

What
Another hidden feature in Microsoft Teams that can improve your productivity is using slash commands and keyboard shortcuts.

Why
Not everyone is a fan of keyboard shortcuts, but for oft repeated actions, these shortcuts can save a lot of time and extra mouse clicks.

How
To see what different slash commands you can use, type a forward slash ‘/’ into the search bar and you will see a list of options. These include quickly changing your status, making a video call or starting a chat.

To see the menu of keyboard shortcut, simply click Ctrl and . (a period)

What
Users often look for a way to flag messages in Teams. Other than saving a message, there is not currently a way to flag a message.

Why
Most information workers are task-minded and list-driven. Work conversations may, logically, generate work activities. While Cortana is getting better at identifying potential tasks within email, we’re still stuck with manually flagging chats and creating our own tasks within Teams.

How
You can mark an already read message as unread by selecting “mark as unread” from the ellipses (…) menu. This will show that you have an unread message in the left rail and the message will be turned to bold type for easy identification.

What
The immersive reader is great feature available across many Office 365 apps, such as Word and PowerPoint. With it you can hear posts, chat messages, and assignments read aloud. It also includes grammar tools such as Parts of Speech and Picture Dictionary.

Why
Sometimes we need the “hands free” experience, allowing us to multi-task (i.e. use the home gym while listening to an analyst report being read back to you).

How
To use the immersive reader simply click the three dots next to a message and select “immersive reader.” This will bring the message into focus and you can click play to have it read out loud.

What
Personalize your Teams meeting invitations to include your company logo, URL and other header and footer details.

Why
It provides a more polished look and feel to your invites, but also allows you to promote your site and support contact details with every invitations sent.

How
Within the Teams Admin Center, go into Meetings > Meeting settings > Email invitation and add the necessary details. Click ‘Preview invite’ to see your meeting invitation and test your image link.When done, click Save and wait for the changes to propagate on your tenant.

What
A live transcript is not only a feature that makes your meeting more accessible, but it also helps those who are late or missed the meeting to get up to speed quickly.

Why
Transcripts make your Teams Meetings instantly searchable – while the meeting is happening, and once the meeting is over.

How
This feature is available within the desktop version. More details at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-live-transcription-in-a-teams-meeting-dc1a8f23-2e20-4684-885e-2152e06a4a8b

What
By default, all Teams Meetings should be recorded and transcribed, with appropriate compliance and security measures to ensure that these important information assets are treated as any other intellectual property.

Why
Meetings are essentially documents/artifacts that include valuable contextual information that, if they are not recorded and transcribed, could be lost.

The same can be said about chats.

How
Your governance team and/or Admins should establish policies around all Teams Meetings within the Admin Center, recording and transcribing them by default – but also setting appropriate permissions and restrictions about who can view, download, or delete them.

What
Announced as part of Microsoft Ignite 2021, Microsoft Loop is a “reimagining” of Microsoft Office that allows Teams users to insert live components (previously called fluid components) into conversations that can be viewed and updated collaboratively from different workspaces.

Why
Loop components allow people to collaborate on and interact with data no matter which workload they prefer. Loop allows people to collaborate “in the flow of work” without having to constant context switch between apps or tools.

How
Once your Teams Admin has enabled Loop, users will see the Loop components icon appear within the toolbox. More info at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/11/02/microsoft-office-transforming-for-the-hybrid-world/

Video by MVP Darrell Webster at https://youtu.be/xQGOovY79VE

What
The pace of new features and changes within Microsoft 365 can be a challenge to keep up with, but you can sync your Message Center updates with Planner/Tasks in Teams, giving a broader audience a heads up on changes to your tenant.

Why
A Message Center sync allows your team to more readily review and triage announcements as they appear, more quickly identifying and mitigating changes that will impact your employees

How
The Teams Admin needs to enable the sync and point the updates to a new or existing Planner plan. There are a few basic options for how the updates will be organized. More info at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/planner/track-message-center-tasks-planner

What
“Tabs allow team members to access services and content in a dedicated space within a channel or in a chat. This lets the team work directly with tools and data, and have conversations about the tools and data, all within the context of the channel or chat.”

Why
Tabs are one of the most basic, and yet powerful new features of Microsoft Teams, giving you the ability create tabs for every tool, spreadsheet, video, or website that is essential to your project or team. Tabs make Teams the “hub” for your work.

How
At the top of your Teams workspace, select the + to add a new Tab and select from the many available options. Click ‘Save’ to add the tab.

What
There isn’t a great way using native functionality to reorganize Teams, channels and private channels to improve how your collaboration is organized. Using a third-party migration tool like AvePoint Fly can help you reorganize your Teams information architecture to maximize productivity.

Why
The way that you use Microsoft Teams may have drastically changed. Or, perhaps you’ve experienced M&A, divestitures and other organizational shifts that can lead to things being in the wrong place. You could have “bottom heavy” Teams with channels that might be better as separate Teams or “top heavy” Teams where a Team might work better as a private channel under another. Or your naming conventions might simply be a mess.

How
Communicate with your Team owners to fully understand how each is used and its importance. Focus on the end user experience and how the future structure will relate back to the implementation- what processes will interact with which Teams, how associated information will be stored, secured and then archived or deleted when it’s no longer essential. Use a third-party tool that will preserve as much Teams data fidelity as possible to pilot and then execute your migration.

What
With every private chat, four tabs are provisioned by default: Conversations, Files, Organization, and Activity. Users have the ability to add additional tabs that can only be seen by chat members

Why
For ongoing private chats (e.g. manager and direct report) you may have tools and data on which you collaborate regularly. As with tabs in channels, you can use tabs in chats to surface important data and tools.

How
Select the target chat, and at the top of the workspace, click on the + to add a new tab.

What
You can send an email to a channel in Teams using the channel email address. Once an email is part of a channel, anyone can reply to it to start a conversation.

Why
Sometimes you may want to redirect an important email thread to Teams so that everyone on the project team can see and participate in the discussion.

How
Within the target channel, click on the ellipsis (…) and select ‘Get Email Address’. Copy the email address, and paste into your forwarded message.

What
The Teams mobile app is a quick and easy way to stay on top of important conversations across multiple channels, Teams, and even domains whether you’re in front of your primary machine or working remotely from your phone.

Why
Information Workers are becoming more and more comfortable with reading content from their mobile devices. The Teams mobile interface makes it easy to see notifications and move between conversations. Additionally, the mobile app can seamlessly move between domains – something the desktop app still struggles with.

How
Download the mobile app from your favorite app store, and add relevant login details. To move between domains, simply click on your profile, and then select the domain.

What
Keep your most-used apps right organized and easily accessible by adding them to the left rail in Teams.

Why
As Teams truly becomes the hub for teamwork, you might find yourself constantly toggling between key apps and tools, such as Yammer or Lists or Tasks. Rather than navigating down into your Teams and channels to access these apps, just pin them!

How
Using the ellipsis (…) on the left rail, find the relevant app in the most recent used or through search, and right click on the app icon to pin the app to the left rail. To un-pin, simply right-click on the app icon and select ‘Unpin’.

What
“Microsoft Search in Teams and Office mobile is adding support for natural language queries in English in the U.S. With Teams mobile, you will be able to type phrases in the search box or tap on the mic to ask Cortana to find messages, chats, meetings, people, files, and links bookmarked by administrators in a way that covers keywords as well as a range of time in Teams.

In addition, you will also be able to ask Cortana to look for messages or chats from a particular person, topic, or across a range of time.”

Why
Some people are less adept at typing with their thumbs while driving. Cortana can save you time (and possibly your life!)

How
Available now in the US, this feature will be rolled out to other regions over the course of 2021. To use, simply click on the microphone icon next to search.

What
With tags, you can categorize people based on attributes, such as role, project, skill, training, or location and essentially create distribution groups in Teams.

Why
For some topics or projects, you may find yourself repeatedly notifying the same group of people each time there is an update. Instead, create a tab for the project with all relevant stakeholders, allowing you to @mention the group in one simple step.

How
Find the relevant Team on the left, and select the ellipsis (…) and choose ‘Manage Tags’. A dialog box will open allowing you to create a name a tag, and add members.

What
Team templates are great but they also have limitations. Using a Teams template wont transfer content or membership. In addition, any type of policy (ie Team owners cannot create a SharePoint sub-site) cannot be included in a Team template. Finally, team templates are tenant wide so each department will see the others’ templates.

Using an automated governance tool like Cloud Governance can automate provisioning using pre-configured templates that include channel and tab setups but also membership and operational governance settings such as external sharing, expiration and more.

Why
Each department collaborates in different ways at different levels of sensitivity. You can address those unique needs and enforce polciies without hampering the collaboration in other departments.

How
With Cloud Governance, users can navigate to an organizational app in Teams which presents a tailored catalogue of services that allow the creation of appropriate Microsoft 365 workspaces based on who the requestor is and what they need. The workspace is then automatically configured (and can be immediately provisioned or submitted for conditional approval) using the organization’s pre-determined governance policies.

What
Set up Teams Meetings to record and transcribe by default. Providing an instantly searchable digital asset to your information management system.

Why
Meetings are an important information asset. By automatically recording your meetings by default, you can then use the native transcription capabilities in Stream to generate a searchable record of each meeting – or leverage this transcript to publish your meeting recording publicly, thus improving SEO for your shared content.

How
An Admin can set a Stream policy to record and transcribe every Teams Meeting. If these are not turned on by default, the user can go into Stream and edit their recording, setting the default language and turning on live captions to start the transcription process, which will appear in the box to the right of the recording.

What
Meeting presenters can prepare polls in advance and launch the polls before, during, or after meetings that attendees can easily view and answer.

Why
Polls liven up an otherwise boring meeting, and help the presenter to gather important feedback.

How
Begin the process by adding the Polls app as a tab to your chat or meeting. As you prepare various polls to be launched during your meeting, you will see them as drafts within the tab. You can determine the order in which you publish each poll, or launch them all in rapid succession. Once you launch a poll, it shows as live in your Polls tab. By clicking View Results, you can track responses in real-time.