Microsoft Teams

What is Microsoft Teams?
Built on the global secure cloud of Office 365, Microsoft Teams brings together people, content and conversations in a chat-based workspace on the desktop and on mobile, supporting iOS, Android, and Windows platforms.  Microsoft Teams provides immediate, secure, and customizable communication with all team members whether on the go, in the cloud, in the office, a combination of any or all of these scenarios. 

The Four Core Foundation

Microsoft Teams is built on Four Core Foundations, creating a digital workspace for collaborative teams resulting in high performance. 

The Four Core Foundations are:

1. Chat for Today’s Teams:  Microsoft Teams provides team chat in a persistent and threaded format for all team members.  The default setting provides visibility for conversations for all members; however, for breakout teams, private and smaller group discussions can be created.  Voice and video conferencing are supported with the integration of Skype, which in turn provides the flexibility for collaboration not only from a single site but also from multiple sites that can be in various cities or continents.  Bringing to a member’s digital workspace is the ability to add a personal touch for self-expression is a library of emoji’s, stickers, memes, and GIFs; 
2. Hub for Teamwork:  Microsoft Teams is built upon Office 365 Groups providing seamless cross-application while preserving the team members sense of context when sharing with others.  Because Microsoft Teams is built upon Office 365 Groups, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve are built right in providing the capability to work with Microsoft Office documents within the Microsoft Teams experience.  Microsoft Graph brings the power of intelligence for discovery, relevancy and sharing of the most frequently accessed information for the team and its members;
3. Customizable for Each Team:  Rich extensibility and open APIs provide each team the ability to customize their experience to their specific needs, which follows Microsoft’s belief that there is no one tool that will fit the needs of every team and its members.  Each team member can customize and organize conversations by topic by creating channels.  Each channel can then be customized with a feature called Tabs.  Tabs provide access to frequently used documents, applications and cloud services such as OneNote, SharePoint, Planner or other third-party solutions such as Zendesk, Hootsuite, and Asana.  Sharing the same Connector Model as Exchange, Microsoft Teams allows for notifications and updates from third-party services like Twitter and GitHub. There is also full support for Microsoft Bot Framework, bringing intelligent first- and third-party services into the team environment.  Microsoft Teams Developer program will allow developers to start building integrations to extend Microsoft Teams; and
4. Security Teams Trust:  Office 365 customers have a high standard of expectation for data security, and Microsoft Teams delivers with encrypted data in transit and at rest.  Enhanced identity protection with multi-factor authentication provides an additional layer of security.  As with all Microsoft commercial services, the transparent operating model will have no standing access to customer data.  Key compliance standards will be supported, such as HIPPA, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and EU Model Clauses.  As with all Office 365 services, it will be provisioned and managed centrally. 

Join the broadest and deepest portfolio of collaboration apps and services for true team collaboration.  To join, activate Microsoft Teams by going to the Office 365 admin center, clicking Settings>Services & Add Ins>Microsoft Teams.  Welcome to flexible, instantaneous team collaboration from your desktop and your mobile device!