Microsoft Teams - Getting Started

What is Microsoft Teams? Microsoft Teams is a chat and collaboration platform for Microsoft Office 365 designed to simplify group work.
Why does Microsoft Teams matter? In addition to chat-based communications, Teams' integration with other Microsoft services allows for shared files and calendars, collaborative editing, and easy switching between voice, video and text chat.
Microsoft Teams is a unified platform that combines all of the Skype for Business chat and audio/video conferencing capabilities with the file sharing and collaboration capabilities of SharePoint and the Office 365 Online apps. Additionally, with Teams, organizations can bring staff together in logical groups to work together and have discussions using channels to organize communication. Here is a quick video that provides an overview of all that you can do within Microsoft Teams.


Teams is designed to provide an easier way for groups of people to communicate and collaborate.

The common approach of communicating via group emails and sharing files via a patchwork of different services is difficult with the potential for missed messages and files. This is the problem Teams is designed to solve.

Accessing Teams

Teams can be accessed through the Office 365 Cloud suite of applications. It can also be downloaded as a local software program onto your computer and accessed on mobile devices. 

To access the cloud-based version, navigate to, or click on your preset bookmarks labeled City of Round Rock > Office Anywhere.

Next, click on the squares in the upper-left corner to launch the App tray, then select Teams. Click More Apps if you do not see Teams in the list. This will launch the web-based version of Teams.

To download Teams to your computer, click on Get App in the lower-left corner of the web-based Teams app. 

Proceed with downloading the application.  

You can pin Teams to your Taskbar by clicking the Start button, right-click on the Teams program, and select Pin to taskbar. The Teams icon will then automatically show in the Taskbar. 

To download the app on a mobile device, navigate to the app store on your phone and search for Microsoft Teams. 

The steps for accessing Teams are also shown in the video at the top of the page.  

In the next article, we will take a deeper dive into Teams and discuss creating a Team and then breaking conversations out into channels.

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