In the world of business and finance, there’s never a lull in the talk about solutions that would help businesses function and thrive better. One of those topics is collaboration platforms. In today’s market, many providers offer this service, but among them, there is one very useful solution that we will talk about today, and that is Microsoft Teams. It is free and comes with Microsoft365. In this article, we will tell you everything you need to know about this platform and its special features.
What is Microsoft Teams?
As mentioned earlier, Microsoft Teams is a cloud platform designed for collaboration. Its main features include business correspondence, calls, and video conferencing between two partners, as well as sharing certain files. This feature can be used by organizations of all sizes.
With Teams, entrepreneurs and their employees can remotely work on a collaborative project online in real-time, and you can do it from various devices, even mobile devices. And integration with other business programs makes it easy to save and transfer files.
At the time of the pandemic, Microsoft Teams became especially useful because many companies went into quarantine and continued to operate remotely, and this platform helped keep partners connected and continue to work as usual.
Key features of Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams has its own set of features that help companies and employees communicate with each other in a confidential environment. Here are some of those features:
- Chat messaging – The platform was built around chat, and therefore has several varieties of conversations (group and private), as well as audio or video calling capabilities. Like other conventional chat, Teams includes the presence of emoticons and GIF images
- Call – the platform has cloud telephony with the help of which, users can make a call using VoIP. Through this program, it is also possible to redirect calls to mobile or landline phones
- Video meetings – a particularly useful feature that has replaced real conversations for many companies during the pandemic. Teams offer users customizable virtual backgrounds, video call recording, an interactive whiteboard, and separate discussion rooms – a basic but very effective set
- Screen sharing is far from a new feature, but it can still be useful to users. With it, clients can share desktop screens and all the files on them directly during a video call
- Calendar – helps users not to forget about important meetings and appointments
- File Sharing -Secure file sharing is a very useful feature that allows you to store and edit files directly on the platform, even share editing is possible
- Webinars – users can host webinars for up to 1,000 people. And during the quarantine, the developers released an update that helped accommodate more than 20,000 people for the online broadcast
How secure are Microsoft Teams?
The developers of Microsoft Teams have taken care of the security of their platform and built-in security features such as data encryption, two-factor authentication, and single sign-on feature. They also report that Teams can use the security features of programs with which it has been integrated.
Other security features:
- ATP – Teams allows users to decide whether files are malicious and block access to them
- Private channels help information within a conversation to remain private and restrict access to it from other users, this is a useful feature when you need to discuss confidential things that should only concern certain people
- End-to-end encryption (E2EE) for VoIP peer-to-peer calls, a feature that secures online conversations
- Safe Links – blocks any malicious links that get into any Office application.