Describe Teams
For many years, Microsoft has provided organizations with real-time communications and conferencing with their line-of-communication server products. But now, cloud computing has become the catalyst for the most recent evolution in the product. Today, Microsoft Teams provides a broad set of communication and collaboration features as part of Microsoft 365.
What is Teams?
Teams is the central collaboration workspace in Microsoft 365. You can use Teams to:
- Make audio and video calls
- Manage meetings and private messages
- Collaborate through team chats
Important
Teams provides enhanced security features and standards compliance to help ensure that your organization’s most sensitive collaborations are private.
- Schedule and join online meetings with or without high-definition (HD) video
- Manage Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls
- Manage dial-in audio conferencing options
- Share your files, apps, or desktop interface for online meetings
Teams provides a central hub for collaboration. Within team workspaces, you can find content, tools, people, and conversations.
You can use the following Microsoft 365 elements to enhance Teams functionality:
- Microsoft SharePoint Online
- Microsoft OneNote
- Office 365 groups
Note
Teams provides enterprise security and compliance features that help keep data encrypted both at rest and in transit.
Teams interacts with the following online services:
- Microsoft Exchange Online
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft OneDrive for Business
Tip
To access the full Teams experience, you should enable every user for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office 365 group creation.
Architecture
The Teams architecture is comprised of two components, described in the following table.
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Teams | A team is a group of people working on a project. Each team consists of Team owners and Team members. Within Teams, team owners can: add owners and members; rename or delete teams; manage team settings; and set moderation settings. |
| Channels | Channels are the key to organizing team collaboration. Channels can cover different topics within a team and are open to everyone on the team. When you create a team, a default channel named General is created. |
Tip
Each generated team also generates an Office 365 group.
Tip
Team members can add additional channels to the team.
Licensing
Teams is not offered as a standalone plan. It combines services from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. Office 365 subscriptions that include Teams also include these core services. If you want to use Teams, you’ll need at least one of the subscriptions in the following table.
| Small business Office 365 plans | Enterprise Office 365 plans | Education Office 365 plans | Developer plans | Government plans |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Basic | E1 | Education A1 | Developer | Government G3 |
| Business Standard | E3 | Education A3 | Government G5 | |
| Business Premium | E5 | Education A5 | ||
| F1 | ||||
| F3 |
Although the following retired plans are no longer available for purchase, if you have an existing license for them, they do support Teams:
- Enterprise E4
- Education E3