COVID-19
Welcome to the Microsoft Teams Rapid Resource Center
The time for rapid, highly-informed decisions to keep your business working is right now. The way to put the power of Teams to work is right here. Microsoft is making Teams available to all organizations.
Download this guide for how-to instructions, best practices and additional
resources to help you put Teams to work.
Bring people together to chat, share content and access the tools you need to collaborate and achieve more.
Setting up a group to collaborate on a piece of work could be as simple as creating a channel or identifying an existing channel for the right subset of the people in an existing team. Make use of private channels to limit access rather than creating a whole new team.
Add and organize channels based on sub teams or workstreams. Structure folders and subfolders ahead of time.
Add tabs to link to key documents, external sites or external applications that people need to do their work.
You can customize notifications to prioritize messages about key projects and avoid being “over-notified.
Governance is key to managing access, documents, and other tasks.
Link across teams to co-author and edit documents in real-time, share and store files, and gather feedback all in one place.
Work with a cloud-first mentality
Save your files to your teams, then share a link to save your and your colleagues’ inbox space.
Get up to speed on version controls
Learn how file versioning and check-out features work so you can get away from trying to manage versions and archives.
Host and join conference calls and video calls with people outside of your organization even if they’re not on Teams.
Host calls with external contacts
For simple video/conference calls with external clients you can set up a normal Teams call and add your external participants. They can join via a browser or Teams client.
Set up guest access
If your external contact does have Teams deployed, inquire if they have guest access enabled and if they could join you to a team.
Access meetings by phone
External clients can also join your Teams meeting by phone, though that would limit their meeting options.
Bring people together to chat, share content and access the tools you need to collaborate and achieve more.
People are more engaged when they can see each other. Use video and encourage all participants to do so.
Meeting Notes can be captured directly in the meeting and the meeting chat is available for later reference as well as for team members who are not able to join.
Understand the different ways to share content during the meeting so you are prepared with the best option. Have your content ready to share before starting the call.
Collaboration tools, such as Whiteboard, help capture work and ideas for easy sharing later.
Teams gives you the ability to turn on live captions and subtitles to ensure that everyone is able to understand Teams conversations. This includes not only those who are deaf or have a hearing loss but also those in noisy environments.
Set up and host Teams meetings or Live Events to keep a large, distributed team up to date on projects, progress, and priorities.
For smaller groups (up to 250 people), you can use a standard Teams meeting which will allow for full interaction with participants. For larger (250- 10,000 people) sessions, use Teams Live events, which is intended for one-to-many communications where the host of the event is leading the interactions and audience participation is primarily to view the content shared by host.
Assign a Producer who will control what/who is shown when during the call. Plan in advance who all of the presenters will be and ensure they all have a great connection, proper lighting, know their part, know who they are handing over to, and are well prepared.
Test all presenter connections and video and do a run-through of the session at least one day before.
Connect groups for real-time co-creation through video, chat, whiteboading and more, then share the output and results.
Successful workshops require a clear alignment on desired goals and outcomes. This is even more true when running a remote workshop.
Virtual workshops require more preparation compared to on-site workshops – account for double to triple the amount of planning and organization typically required.
When planning activities, consider which techniques are most effective for achieving the desired outcome in each activity. Expect to cover about 1/3 of the activities that you would normally cover in a physical workshop and favor activities that can be done individually. Play music during the silent time!
If your workshop is interaction-heavy, consider the general rule of thumb of 1 facilitator to 6 participants. If a large audience is expected for your workshop, use breakouts.
When selecting tools to support your workshop, make sure they let participants communicate in real-time and asynchronously if needed. Tools should also help share content, stay organized, and think visually. Make sure you and your workshop support team understand how your tools will work with each other.
Using a collaboration tool like Microsoft Whiteboard is key for engaging participants.
Attention spans tend to wander around the 2-4 hours mark. If possible, consider scheduling segments of the workshop across multiple days or weeks.
Share the materials you need to educate and inform your team, then encourage participation to enhance learning.
Create a private Teams channel to co-create session materials with other session planners, then set up a meeting on this channel to dry run your presentation.
Once you’re prepared, set up a Teams channel for session participants and engage them before, during and after your event. Share files like your meeting agenda, lesson plan, or other pre-read materials prior to your session, then post action items and follow up activities once your session is complete.
Share and organize files corresponding to your lesson plan to encourage self-directed learning along with instructions for navigating your learning modules. You can also use the Stream application to create a video library within your Teams channel.
Set up a Teams Live Event, an extension of Teams Meetings, when you need to broadcast video to a large online audience. This is best for presentation-style, one-to-many communications.
Set up a Teams Meeting to facilitate a smaller, more interactive learning session when audience conversation and participation is encouraged.
When conducting a live session, it is ideal to have two facilitators: one to lead the session and the other to moderate the chat thread for questions, comments and feedback from the audience.
Record a live session to share it afterwards or pre-record a session to allow for self-directed viewing.
Use Microsoft Whiteboard to have your audience draw, sketch and write together on a shared digital canvas during your learning session. Use the Polly application to poll your audience.
Make sure your Internet connection is stable. Connect via an Ethernet cable if possible, limit network traffic and close applications that you are not using.
Make sure they can hear you
