5 Must-Have Apps for Microsoft Teams

Hello and welcome to the very first blog post of my eight-part series Let’s talk about Microsoft 365. In today’s post I am writing about a software which has probably seen my face more often than my own mother in the last year – Microsoft Teams.
To be more specific, I want to share with you my selection of the 5 must-have apps by Microsoft that can be integrated into your Microsoft Teams to boost your team’s communication and productivity to the next level.

With over 115 million active daily users back in October 2020 [1], Microsoft Teams has grown to be one of the largest communication platforms for business and education worldwide. Its growth may have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the trend of working remotely and virtually is one we have seen develop more and more over the last years.
That being said, working and studying virtually and using tools such as Microsoft Teams will probably stay with us in one form or another even after the pandemic is over, which is why it is essential that we use the technology we are faced with to its full potential.

1. Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner is a definite game changer for any team. With little actual face-time and many individual tasks, it’s often tricky to create an overview and see the bigger picture. If you want to organise and visualize projects and the tasks within, Planner offers you a simple but very effective solution.
For each Teams group you have, you can create a Planner board with different buckets and tasks. While some projects might ask for buckets that are based on priorities, others might work better split into sub-categories. The tasks can be moved from one bucket to another and you can assign them to specific people in your team and add details like sub-tasks, the deadline and specific tags.
Planner gives you the opportunity to redefine how you work together in your teams, in a transparent and more agile way. 

2. Microsoft Whiteboard

The cool thing about a whiteboard in any team meeting is that it allows you to collaborate on one shared canvas where you can write, draw and put up sticky notes. This is also valid for the digital version Microsoft Whiteboard. Whether you are in a team workshop with the goal to come up with a new campaign or simply brainstorming topics for your next group project, Microsoft Whiteboard allows you to create and share ideas in a group, as if you were standing together in front of a limitless whiteboard. The best thing – it is already integrated into Microsoft Teams and you can use it in any Teams call. Simply go on the share function and select the Whiteboard option. You can either edit the whiteboard just by yourself or enable the collaboration mode, which pretty much guarantees a more engaged and fun interaction.

3. Microsoft Forms

Whether you want to do a quick pulse-check survey or engage meeting participants with a quick quiz, Microsoft Forms is the way to go. With its seamless integration into Teams you can easily create surveys, polls and quizzes directly in the chat. Simply open the chat, click on the three dots in the chat panel and select the Forms app. A window will appear where you can add your question and answers, and enable multiple answers as well as anonymous responses. Once you click save and send, the questions and answers will appear in the chat for the participants to answer – simple as that.

4. Microsoft Lists

Microsoft List is an app I have discovered just recently and let me tell you, if your brain is made up of lines and boxes, like mine is, you will love it! You can add Lists to your Teams channels as a tab and create a new list from scratch, based on an existing list, from templates or by importing data from Excel. Lists provides you with an easy way to visualise and keep track of your work together in a team. So for all of my fellow list lovers out there: imagine your typical on-paper list but all of your teammates have access to it, it’s interactive and colour-coded!
Check out the video below to get an even better feel of how Lists can bring some more structure into your collaborations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-PIO9YQf8

5. Microsoft OneNote

Last but certainly not least, Microsoft OneNote has been a long-time favourite of mine when it comes to taking and structuring notes. While we already had the ability to share notes and entire notebooks with others via SharePoint, the integration into Teams is definitely a superior way to keep team-relevant notes in one place. For reoccurring business or project meetings you could for example have one dedicated section for meeting minutes and another one for sharing ideas or you could divide the sections by team members.
My top tip for students would be to create a team within Microsoft Teams with fellow students and use OneNote to capture lecture notes together. This way you can fill in for each other and have one complete overview ready for revising ahead of the exam period.
For more information on how you can get started with OneNote, check out my quick-start guide to Microsoft OneNote.

In case any of these apps are not already installed in your Teams account you can always contact your organisation’s IT desk and check availability with them.

Let me know what you think about my selection. Do you have a secret weapon outside of the Microsoft 365 sphere to boost your Teams productivity? I’m looking forward to seeing your feedback in the comment section below!

Check out the other posts of my series “Let’s Talk about Microsoft 365″

?   Microsoft Word: The Simple Formatting Guide
?   Best Microsoft Apps For Working On-The-Go
?   Why you will love Microsoft OneDrive
?   How to Animate Videos with PowerPoint
?   7 Outlook Tips to Boost Your Productivity
?   A quick-start guide to Microsoft OneNote
?   Office 365 Features You Need to Know About

References

1. Microsoft (2020). Microsoft Teams reaches 115 million DAU—plus, a new daily collaboration minutes metric for Microsoft 365. Accessed 29.03.2021. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/10/28/microsoft-teams-reaches-115-million-dau-plus-a-new-daily-collaboration-minutes-metric-for-microsoft-365/