Teams is a collaboration tool within the Microsoft suite of tools that Dartmouth licenses for all faculty, staff and students.
What is an Office 365 Team?
A team is a shared workspace where team members can collectively get things done. It comes with:
- Conversation for group chat communication
- Chat for private one-on-one communication
- Calendar for scheduling group meetings and events
- Library for storing and working on group files and folders
- OneNote notebook for taking project and meeting notes
- Assignments tool for organizing your work
- App Add-ons for adding apps that are specific to the type of team you have
How would an Office 365 Team help me collaborate?
Rather than emailing questions, information or files around, just send a chat to the team asking everyone to provide feedback on the file(s) found within the site. In addition, multiple members of the Team can be working on the same Office document at the same time. You’ll see in the upper right corner of the window everyone who is currently working on that document.
What’s the difference between an Office 365 Team and a group mailing list?
A group mailing list just allows you to email information, files, calendar invites to a group of people. With a group mailing list, everything is stored in everyone’s mailbox. With Teams, chat is the primary means of communication. Send a chat to the team and everyone on the team sees their Team app light up. They open the application, and can respond to the chat, review the file you requested, set up a meeting, etc. Chats are stored within the Team site so as new members are added to the Team, they can see the communication that occurred before they joined, rather than having to rely on someone sending them the previous email messages.
Are there limitations to Office 365 Teams?
- You can have up to 1,000 members in a team.
- You can store up to 25TB of data in a team.
- Any individual can create up to 250 teams.
How do I create an Office 365 Team?
See https://services.dartmouth.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=67035.
Want more information?
See https://services.dartmouth.edu/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=66955 or contact the IT Service Desk at 603-646-2999, via email at help@dartmouth.edu, or your department’s IT support office.