Collaborate with Microsoft Teams at Purchase College

Microsoft Teams Videoconferencing, Chat, and Collaboration tools

Teams is a pillar of the Microsoft collaboration and office suites. At its most basic level it provides Videoconferencing, chat, and file sharing tools to enhance interactions with colleagues within your department and across the college. Teams has a simple and intuitive interface, and you can instantly use it effectively. There is little to no learning curve for the activities you use the most, and there are abundant self-paced tutorials available.

Many departments across campus are already using Teams daily for chat, collaboration and video purposes.

Videoconferencing: When you schedule a meeting in Outlook, there is a “Teams” button that adds a meeting link to the Outlook meeting invitation. That is simpler than logging into zoom, constructing the zoom meeting, and then copying the zoom invitation into Outlook to send out to attendees.

Teams is much more spontaneous than Zoom, with no requirement to create meetings in advance. You can make video calls simply by clicking on a Contact’s Name in your Teams list. When you are in a call, you can add others to that call by typing in their name.

Chat: Teams Chat is always on and can be used from your Contacts list to send text messages, files and attachments to others in real time. If a recipient is offline, the message is stored and available when they return. Zoom chat only exists during a meeting and is easily lost once it ends.

Collaboration: Committee and Workgroup Teams can be established by CTS and used with Video Calls, Chat, and File sharing libraries automatically stored in SharePoint. Your workgroup will all have access to the calls, chats, and files associated with your team.

Files can be viewed by the Team they were shared with or as a whole – all the files you shared – all files shared with you, etc.

Smartphone App: Teams is also available as an app for your smartphone, so you can join meetings from your smartphone or chat while you’re on the go.

Captions and Transcripts: Teams has the same AI-captions and transcript features we are accustomed to.