Teams

• Team-Focused Discussions

• Each group can have their own communication area or “team”
• Team owners create “channels” for different topic areas within their team
• Discussions are “thread-based”, making it easy to find specific communication and driving more productive collaboration
• Adding a new member automatically gives them full access to everything previously discussed and shared, easing their entry into the team and making them more productive

Document Storage & Sharing

• Each team has their own secure area for file storage and sharing
• Since Teams is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365, access is seamless and intuitive
• Documents can be viewed and edited directly in Teams, in the native Office apps, and in SharePoint
• Multiple people can collaborate by simultaneously editing the same document
• When needed, the full capabilities of SharePoint can be used for advanced file sharing

Online Meetings

• Audio and video meetings can be easily set up with any mix of UMass Lowell and external guests
• Documents can be easily shared and edited during the meeting
• Meetings can be scheduled with specific people (like a traditional invitation) or with an entire team

Full Phone Services

• IT has starting to migrate UMass Lowell faculty and staff phone services from Skype for Business to Teams
• All phone services and other telephony functions will eventually migrate from Skype for Business to Teams
• Microsoft’s Unified Communications R&D efforts are focused on Teams and they plan to end support for Skype for Business in 2024
• The migration of UMass Lowell’s phone service to Teams will leverage our knowledge and investment in Skype for Business

• Expansion

• Microsoft Teams is designed to be modular, expandable, and flexible
• The platform can be customized to support both business and academic use
• There are hundreds of add-on applications or plug-ins – many of which are free – that can enhance the native functionality and integrate with other solutions