Tip o’ the Week 416 – Teams Slash At Apps

There’s a perennial tension amongst productivity evangelists, about how best to do it – from which methodology to use, to which tools to fulfil their hopes & dreams. Similar behaviour occurs amongst communications czars – don’t send attachments, put them in SharePoint!; email is the devil, we should use Yammer!; this time, it’s about the world of team-based collaboration platforms, pioneered by the likes of Slack/Fleep/Flock/Zoho and inhabited by the Microsoft Teams product set too. Some companies barely use email, instead turning to persistent chat offered by these kinds of apps.

Teams is part of Office 365 (well, for business users – it’s hard to think of a scenario where you’d need Teams for home use…), and in time will subsume the Skype for Business capabilities that O365 users access today. Some businesses will still have an on-premises Skype for Business installation, which means that product isn’t going away entirely, at least not for a good few years.

There have been a bunch of updates to Teams in recent days, signalling the largest update to the Teams software so far. See more on what’s new here.

If you press / or @ in the command line at the top of the Teams site or app, you’ll see a list of commands you can use – like /whatsnew, to see a change log of recent releases.

Using apps (installed from an app store within the Teams UI – just type @ in the command line to see the list) lets you quickly embed content from another source, into the conversation stream within your Team channel. There are already over 120 apps available, from all kinds of third party publishers – it’s worth browsing the different categories within the store, rather than just the top picks you’re initially presented with.

Instead of taking a screenshot or just pasting a URL to a story/place/whatever… you can embed a hot-linked summary of the real content and make it easy for people to jump to it.