What is Teams?
Microsoft Teams is an application for collaborating with colleagues.
Microsoft Teams is included as part of Office 365, so if you have a license for Office 365 you automatically have a license for Teams.
You don't need to have an Office 365 license to use teams, there are guest licenses which are free, so you can collaborate with external people.
The benefit of having Teams as part of Office 365 is that your colleagues are already connected to you, so you don't have to add anybody (unless they are outside of our organisation).
Features
Chat
Teams has a chat functionality that can be used like Skype, or other popular messenger apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram.
Teams
Teams are groups of people that collaborate together. A Team could be a department, or a group of people working on a project, or just for fun (I believe theres a Pickering Diet Group out there :-) )
Channels
Channels are shared workspaces within a team. In a channel you can have chat conversations, store and share files, collaborate on documents in real time, create wikis. Lots of thrid party apps can be added to Teams, for example Smartsheets can be added to Teams. A team can have multiple channels - for example within the IT Department we have an IT Team, and different channels for different projects that we are working on.
Meetings
You can host open meetings for anyone in the team to join at any time or schedule a meeting between some users at a given time which directly appear on their office 365 calendar.
Video
Videoconferences can be initiated from Teams, this is very handy for quick impromptu meetings.
Mention and Update
The @ mention feature can be used to tag people into comments or conversation to keep them updated on how things are developing or ensuring they notice an important notice.