<your choice>.onmicrosoft.com. This is your Office 365 domain. In this example, I chose teamsfd.onmicrosoft.com for the domain. You can always add a custom domain later down the road if you prefer. For example, I might connect teamsfordummies.com to our Office 365 account and get email there, too.Once you have filled out the information, your free trial will be created, as shown in Figure 1-7. This can take a few minutes, so be patient.FIGURE 1-6: Choosing an Office 365 Business plan.FIGURE 1-7: The Office 365 page creating your trial and welcoming you.6 Click the Get Started button.A tutorial walks you through adding a domain and additional users. Once you walk through the setup, you are presented with your Office 365 dashboard where you see a quick tutorial. After the tutorial you are presented with the Office 365 main landing page, as shown in Figure 1-8.Congratulations! You are now up and running with Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.
FIGURE 1-8: The main Office 365 landing page.
www.office.com and logging in with the username and password you created.
For more information on using Office 365, check out Office 365 For Dummies, 3rd Edition (Wiley).
Wrapping Your Head Around Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a relative newcomer to the world of business communication software. It was first announced in 2017, and when I first heard about it, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I had been using Skype to chat with friends and family for years, and I had used Lync (later rebranded Skype for Business) for business communications. Since its announcement, Teams has been integrated with just about every product Microsoft offers and has swallowed all the features that used to make Skype for Business so great. You can make phone calls, chat, conduct meetings, share your screen, and have video calls, just to name a few of the features Teams offers.
Microsoft Teams as a communications platform, replacing Skype for Business, is nice, but that is not what has made it the fastest growing product in Microsoft history. What makes Teams so special is that Microsoft has invested heavily to make it the face and entry point to almost all other Office services. For example, I am writing this book using Microsoft Word, but I am doing so from within the Teams app, as shown in Figure 1-9.
In addition to integrating with Microsoft Office, Teams also integrates with several third-party applications, as shown in Figure 1-10.
FIGURE 1-9: Using Microsoft Word from within Teams.
FIGURE 1-10: Some of the apps that integrate with Teams.
To be fair, the big competitor to Teams called Slack (https://slack.com), is also racing to integrate other software and be the primary business tool you use for communications and productivity. Slack had a head start — hitting the market in 2013 — and became incredibly popular very quickly. However, Microsoft had a big advantage in that so many people already used Office products, so when Microsoft integrated Office with Teams, it was an easy move for users to start using Teams. In fact, in 2020 it was announced that there are more active users of Teams now than Slack. That is a big milestone.
Don’t get me wrong; I still use Slack in my consulting business, since some of my clients only use Slack and don’t use Teams. In fact, I use other apps, too, such as Google Hangouts (https://hangouts.google.com) and Zoom (https://zoom.us). It is this software diversity that results from my consulting that gives me confidence to contrast and compare these tools.
Microsoft Teams is becoming the one app to rule them all in the Microsoft world. It has become the entry point for Office applications as well as other non-Microsoft software. This is the reason it has grown so quickly. If you are using Microsoft 365 or Office 365, you may find yourself using the integrated services through Teams instead of trying to remember how to use them independently.
Getting Familiar with Teams Terminology
Throughout this book you will explore the concepts of Teams in detail, and keeping the terminology in Teams straight can be a challenge. For example, you will eventually find yourself inviting one of your teammates to your Teams team. Or asking what Teams team your coworker is talking about. Once you get used to it, the terminology will seem normal.
To get a jump on the terms, here are some quick definitions:
Teams: Use the term Teams to refer to the product itself.
Team: A team (lowercased) is a group of users. You can specify settings for teams and have multiple teams within Microsoft Teams. For example, you might want to create a team for accounting, a team for legal, and another team for external contacts.
Channel: A channel is a group chat within a team. A team can have multiple group chats with the idea being that you can create a chat for different topics.
Thread: A thread is a specific topic of discussion within a channel. For example, one person might start a new thread in the channel and then others can reply to that thread. You can have multiple threads going in a channel at the same time.
External/guest user: An external or guest user is a user that is not part of your organization. For example, you might be a consultant and need to communicate with the company’s accountant. You can invite that person as a guest user to your team.
There are, of course, many more terms that you will become familiar with as you continue on your Teams journey, but these are the basic terms to get you started. Once you get familiar with the relationship between Teams, a team, a channel, and a thread, you have all the knowledge you need to dive in further and get productive.
Chapter 2
Navigating Microsoft Teams
IN THIS CHAPTER
