What I learned about Microsoft Teams at Ignite the tour in Stockholm

Today I spent the day at home in Stockholm at Ignite the tour and listened in to some great sessions.

• TMK10 - What's new in Microsoft Teams - the hub for teamwork
• TMK20 - Manage Microsoft Teams effectively while staying secure and compliant - an overview
• TMK30 - Skype for business to Microsoft Teams: guidance for a successful upgrade
• TMK40 - Protect and collaborate on files in the cloud with OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams
• BRK3768 - Skypexit, the inevitable journey from Skype to Teams

Some 500,000 organizations, from small ones with a few users to really big ones with over 100,000 users, are currently using Microsoft Teams. That is quite impressive considering Teams initial release was in March of 2017.

It might not come as surprise though since Microsoft Teams delivers clear value in increased collaboration, something that a recent "Total Economic Impact study" of Microsoft Teams showed in economic terms. The four main benefits of Teams are:

• Teams reduces the total number of meetings and their duration.
• Information workers save 4 hours per week from improved collaboration and information sharing.
• Information workers save more than 1 hour per week by not having to switch between applications. 
• Having resources available online in Teams reduces downtime by 14.6%. 

So, I decided to learn something new about Microsoft Teams.

To start with, I got to know that you can now share your location straight in a Microsoft Teams chat.

Location of Ignite the tour - shared by Teams

The activity feed in the desktop version of Microsoft Teams can be sorted according to "Trending" posts. Trending posts are based on Microsoft Graph and will surface popular posts that might be of interest to you.

In settings / notifications you can control how trending messages will be notified to you.

If you do not see settings for Trending and Suggested messages in this GUI it could be that Graph has not enough data to display such messages. Keep using Teams for a while and they will show up eventually.

I knew the Immersive Reader can read text to you, but I did not know it can even show the words as pictures. In Immersive Reader, click on reading preferences and switch on the picture dictionary.

Picture Dictionary - on.

Now when you find a word you do not understand you can simply click it to get a picture.

I don't know many animal names in English...

Customized backgrounds is something coming soon in Teams, it looks cool and I think people can have a lot of fun with it as well as it being useful depending on where you are when having your meeting.

You almost believe she is in the forest.

We also got to see a lot of the administrative features of Teams such as the underlying architecture, deep dives in One Drive and SharePoint and Data Loss Prevention features. With the Office 365 Groups naming policy it is possible to control naming conventions in Teams.

Two of the speakers also reminded us all regarding the migration from Skype for business to Teams - do not get stuck in Islands mode!