Microsoft Teams is an intelligent communication platform by Microsoft. It comes with Office 365 package. MS Teams is a chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft launched the general availability of MS Teams in March 2017. Since then, it is evolving very rapidly. MS Teams is a successor of Skype for Business and soon, Microsoft is planning to deprecate Skype for Business.
To get our work done quickly, everybody should know some tips and tricks. A power user is one who performs most of their tasks just by typing some commands from the keyboard. Or we can say that a Power User is a person with special skills that a normal user doesn’t have. To become an MS Teams Power User, a person should upgrade his/her ability to do most of the work with the help of keyboard only.
Before we get our hands dirty in the real stuff, let us know how to get MS Teams (if we don’t have it yet).
Go here and log in with your Office 365 credentials. If you don’t have an Office 365 subscription, obtain a free trial from Office 365 E3 Trial.
When you log into your MS Teams (or Teams), it asks if you would like to get the Windows app or would you like to use the web app. This prompt is shown only for the first time. For demo purposes, we are going to use the Windows app of Teams. To download MS Teams client, simply click on the User icon on the top right or click on the Download icon in the left pane.
You can also download a mobile app for iOS, Android, and Windows but those apps do not provide the search bar functionality in recent updates. To know more about Teams, click on the help icon in the left bottom pane of the app.
Let’s skip the creation of team and channel in MS Teams because that isn't what we’re going to learn here for now. If you want to learn how to create a team and a channel in Teams, go to Teams-Channels-Overview.
There are many things a power user can do with special skills in Teams.
There is a search bar in Teams called command box that is very helpful to learn all new things. You must know some keyboard shortcuts too for speeding up your work.
Press Ctrl +. (control key + dot) to open the keyboard shortcut menu.
So, let’s see what we can do now to become a power user.
Press Ctrl + E to open the command box or search bar. Search is the main key to get your work done. There are some commands that are very useful.
Let’s take a scenario where I’m new to Teams.
Press Ctrl + /
It opens all the slash commands available in our Teams. Let’s suppose we want to set our status to do not disturb (DND). Just press Ctrl +/ and type DND.
This sets our status to DND.
As shown in the message below the address bar, you’ll only get notifications for urgent matters and from your priority contact. This way, we can set our status to Available (/available command), Away (/away command), Busy (/busy command) with the help of keyboard slash command.
If we want to call someone in our organization, simply type "/call" in the command box and it asks for the person we want to call. Just type the person's name and hit Enter. The call gets connected to that user.
If we want to send a one-to-one message, simply type "/chat" and it asks for the username and message you want to send to the user.
If you want to go to a team, just type "/goto" and it will show you all the teams available in your MS Team.
Let’s suppose I’m new to the SharePointArmy-Team. I don’t know the users so here, I have an awesome command called "/who". At first, it asks to install the Who app that is very useful in terms of organization.
The Who app provides the following question pattern to ask.
Just type the command and a bot will return you mind-blowing results. Let’s say I type "who reports to" and the name of the person.
It returns the result quickly.
There are a bunch of questions you can ask the Who bot. You can explore it more by yourself. There are many other slash commands that can make a user’s life easier to get their work done.
Teams integrate apps as well. So, there is a command @ that is used to bring the app data into Teams. Also, it is used to send messages to users.
Let’s say we want to get the news in Teams. So, type @News in Teams command box and it will bring the news data in Teams.
If you want to bring YouTube data in Teams, simply type @YouTube [Enter a search term].
Note
The very first-time, Teams asks to install the app (YouTube, News etc.) to get the data into Teams.
You can install useful apps into Teams from the Store (default app store provided by Microsoft in Teams). Let's say you are communicating with one of your colleagues and you want to share a location to meet. So, go to the store and install the Places app provided by Microsoft. After installing the app, now go to the user chat window and type @places command followed by the name of the place you want to meet. It shows the best available results and you can send the location to the user.
You can do a lot of things with the help of commands. So, if you want to become a Microsoft Teams Power User, you must know the power of commands, search box, and apps in the store.
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