Now more than ever, it is important to stay connected with those who matter most. This need to connect, collaborate, and jointly organise our lives is why Microsoft expanded Teams beyond work groups. In March, new features were announced in Teams, designed to bring you closer to your friends and family. The new features start to roll out in preview to the Teams mobile app today and will be fully rolled out in the coming weeks.
At work, every day more people love what Teams does for them because it is the hub for teamwork that lets you chat, meet, call, and collaborate all in one place. While Teams is great for work, it can help everyone better manage their responsibilities across both work and life.
With the new features, Microsoft hope to extend the power of Teams beyond work scenarios to your personal life. Whether you’re a busy parent managing daily family life or just trying to stay connected and in sync with those who matter most, the new features are designed to alleviate the need for disparate tools and instead offer one central hub for individuals, groups, and families to collaborate and stay connected and organised.
You can get started with these new preview features in two ways.
In the modern workplace, there are increasing expectations on employees to innovate and improve their productivity. Microsoft Teams empowers your employees to meet these expectations and allows your organisation to adopt new ways of working by bringing together features from across Microsoft’s offerings in a solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses.
Once you’re signed up, start inviting friends and family and creating your groups!
Just like you do with Teams at work, you can stay connected with friends and loved ones through messaging and video calling. Create groups to chat and call, so you can stay connected with your family, your book club, your virtual Friday happy hour group, or whoever your group may be. You can also chat or call one-on-one. Teams will then become the messaging hub for all your personal chats and video and voice calls, with fun features like sharing GIFs, photos, videos, documents, and even location already integrated.
Teams is more than just a chat and calling app. Once you create your groups or one-on-one chats, you will be able to stay organised by sharing lists, documents, and calendars all within the group dashboard. You can share the reading list and schedule the next virtual meet-up with your book club group or stay on top of grocery lists and assign chores in your family group. You can then easily go back and see the chats, tasks, pictures, videos, and group calendars you have shared within your dashboard. It is a great way to pick up conversations or projects where they left off.
Teams integrates with your other Microsoft 365 apps so you can easily share from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint right from within the Teams app, whether you’re planning your family budget, or trying to prepare your kids’ summer schedules. Since they’re stored in OneDrive, you can access these documents across other devices if you’re away from your phone.
Location sharing* is available as part of these new personal features as well. You can let your loved ones know you’re running late, or that you’re still at the grocery store and can get extra milk, with easy location sharing. While it might be a while before we’re getting together in person, Teams location sharing will make it easy to share your location and find your friends for that park picnic—or in the crowd at a concert.
Together, let’s take this next step with Teams and extend the value of Teams at work to your whole life. General availability of the new features, as well as expanding features to the desktop and web versions of Teams, is expected later this year.
Learn all about Teams in our Office 365 bootcamp and Training
