During the last few years, the need for remote collaboration
between users has grown significantly.
As a result, the growth of one of the Microsoft workloads has matched
that same need for remote connectivity and collaboration.
And that's Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams, previously known as Skype for
Business and previously known as Link and previously known as
Office Communication Server, has definitely gone through many
iterations in its evolution.
Today, Microsoft Teams Online is a service that allows users to
collaborate using chat, sharing files in virtual meetings
and conferences, as well as doing audio calls and
video calls with each other.
Teams has certainly been a very important tool within the
deployment of a Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
In order to manage Microsoft Teams,
we're going to use the Microsoft Teams admin center,
which we can access on the left list of all admin centers here.
So if I click on "Microsoft Teams", the Microsoft Teams admin
center launches, and I'm going to go through some
of the primary functionality of Microsoft Teams.
And later on in this course, we'll look at some of these
much more in detail.
So the first thing that I see here once again are my various cards
that are in my dashboard.
And I can modify the cards here.
I can customize these cards to display relevant information,
mostly about the usage of the Microsoft Teams workload within
my user population.
So for example, here under my teams user activity,
I can click on the last 30 days and I can see when there was much
more activity in teams in my organizations than other
days. Under teams,
this is where I'm going to see all of my various teams.
These virtual collaboration places where people share files and
communicate with each other.
I have many teams in my organization.
Whenever you schedule a meeting on a specific topic,
it will create a separate team.
When you create a group, it will create a separate team.
There are many instances where these teams get created,
and you define the settings for all of these teams,
as well as policies as to how these teams get created
and managed.
The teams are an integral part of the whole team solution.
Then I have my Teams users.
So these are my users, the same users that have mailboxes
with Exchange Online and that access your SharePoint
Online files.
Those are also Team users.
But here I get to manage Teams users specific configurations,
and they will only appear here, of course,
if they have a Teams license.
And in a later video
in this course, we will look specifically at Teams settings.
Then I have also my Teams devices.
This is where you can purchase devices that are going to be
connected directly to your infrastructure.
For example, cameras, conferencing bridges,
speakers, microphones.
All of these can become part of your Teams infrastructure and
they will automatically be able to connect to meeting themselves.
So you can have an audio conferencing system.
If it is enabled for Teams, it can connect itself to the
meeting and wait for the various attendees to that meetings.
As well,
you have devices like Surface Hubs,
which are these collaborative devices where users, both physical
and virtual,
can collaborate into the screen together, and interact on a project,
and modify documents, and draw together if necessary.
So these are all Teams devices.
You can also link to the Teams store,
where you can purchase some of these devices and ensure that they
are supported for Microsoft Teams.
For teams, you can also load apps.
Now they are default apps that are available for Microsoft,
but there are also apps that are published by a number of
publishers out there and you yourself can publish
your corporate app,
your enterprise applications
that would be Teams application for your company only.
Or you can publish apps as a publisher that would be available
to the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Any capabilities can be performed with those various apps.
I can also configure and customize my meetings.
So what types of meetings do I have?
Who's allowed to join my meetings?
How long can the meetings be?
Do we have phone numbers that are associated to those meetings
for users that are non-Team users that want to dial in to a meeting?
We can have audio conferencing settings for those so that these
users would be able to connect to your Teams meetings as well.
There are lots of options for Microsoft meetings.
Your messaging rules as well,
how can users message to each other and to external users?
If you have Microsoft 365 Teams
voice that is enabled,
then you can also configure a number of options related
specifically to voice.
You can connect a PBX system, a phone exchanger system to your
Teams infrastructure so that your users can actually communicate
with external voiced users that are connected through the PSTN or
the typical phone line.
You can also create policies around that,
any policies around how your voicemails are answered,
how calls are put on hold, how caller ID works,
and you can specify also routing policies,
how messages or calls are routed between users within
an organization.
If a user has multiple phone numbers from a mobile device
and their teams phone, how that's routed from
one to the other.
There are a number of options related strictly to voice,
and these are all configured here under the voice settings.
So many options here to configure a Teams infrastructure.
And, of course, we also have guidance on how to implement all
of these things using the Teams advisor.
We have also troubleshooting help under the network planner to see
what the capacity requirements are on bandwidth requirements,
because bandwidth is key when we're going to implement something
as bandwidth-heavy as voice and video communication on our
network infrastructure.
So the network planner will help us in defining a lot
of those things.
And of course, once you've implemented all, you have analytics
and reports which allow you to go ahead and look at the
implementation that you have and see how it's being used,
and identify any issue,
including the call quality dashboard,
which is a very, very important tool in terms of
looking at the quality of the calls on the wire and making
sure that you have, from point to point,
a complete bandwidth availability to support the needs of your
audio and video calls.
So we will look at some of these options more in detail in later
videos in this course.
But for now, that's an overview of the entire infrastructure
for Microsoft Teams.