Microsoft Teams has become a core element of the TLC Creative Services design studio. As example, this blog post was a collaboration doc in our Social Media Team for me (Troy) to write, a few of our design team to access and prep the images outlined and finally accessed by our Social Media manger to transfer all to this blog post. No emailing files. No syncing files to a server and being uncertain if you have the latest version. We use Teams chat to ask each other questions, connect on Teams calls (sometimes with a webcam on, but more often with a screen share), and access project work files and fill in our timesheets.
Focusing on files stored on Teams, the important thing to know if Microsoft Teams is SharePoint – or at least a new interface for SharePoint. Or maybe a better way to say that is, SharePoint files are now accessed through Teams.
This is a good thing because Microsoft has spent years building SharePoint with features like, security, file history, and collaboration. And the collaboration feature is what we cannot function without (collaboration meaning multiple people can access the exact same file, and edit it simultaneously).
Here is a common workflow for our design team at TLC Creative
- The project is added to Teams as a new Channel within our “Projects” Team (the concept of Teams vs. Channels is one of the more difficult things to understand and work with!).
- The presentation(s) is then copied to the Teams folder (as noted earlier, this is really putting the presentation on SharePoint, but without having to deal with SharePoint)
- The design team working on the presentation open the presentation from Teams – and this is important! Open the presentation in DESKTOP PowerPoint. In Teams click the 3-dot menu next to the file name > Open > Open in Desktop.
- A presentation can seamlessly have 1-2-5+ people reviewing, editing or presenting.
- Note: Teams is easy to setup and have people within the same company access files. It gets more temperamental when adding external people, or you being the external person being added to another company’s Microsoft Team (more about our process and some tips in an upcoming post).
How do you know if a presentation is on your local hard drive or on Microsoft Teams?
- Look at the file name in PowerPoint
- Local files literally tell you they are local. After the file name is “Saved to this PC”
- There is a drop-down menu for local files, but it is informational and really of no value.
- And if it is a Teams file, after the file name is “Last Modified: (time stamp)” and a drop-down menu
- That drop-down menu for Teams files has a lot of options
- Rename the file. And the name will be updated on Teams and to anyone that has the file open!
- Version History. Click the “Version History” at the bottom of the file drop-down for a right action pane to open and provide details on every major update, how made it, and ability to open earlier versions of the file to reference or revived content!
Presentation formatting, and presenting, now evolves around Microsoft Teams for us at TLC Creative. We are focusing Microsoft Teams this month on The PowerPoint Blog.
-Troy @ TLC