Access Teams and tour the interface

- [Instructor] In this movie we'll see how to get Microsoft Teams set up and how each individual member of your team will access it. Microsoft Teams is part of an Office 365 business or enterprise account. That means that your organization, usually the company that you work for, must have an Office 365 deployment for that organization and, to be specific, your organization must have an Office 365 Business Premium, Business Essentials, or one of the Office 365 Enterprise deployments, then your companies Office 365 administrator will assign an account to you and also to your coworkers.

And here's how it works once you have your account. You'll need to go to this webpage office.microsoft.com and then you'll sign in. I can hit the Sign In button up here in the top right. And of course I'll sign in with my Office 365 email and password. So I'll put in the email address, then my password, and now I'm signed into Office 365 and this is the main page on the Office 365 website. And there are a few places in this website where you'll see a layout like this with a series of tiles that you can click on to access the different tools and services in Office 365.

What we're looking for is a tile labeled Teams which I can see right here, or, if I go to the app chooser up in the top left corner, I can see Teams is listed there as well. If you did not see it on this main list, you could click on All here and then you get a much longer list and, of course, Teams will be there as well. So you can click on that tile in either of those locations and it will take you to the Microsoft Teams interface. Or, if you just want to skip the Office 365 website, you could go straight to teams.microsoft.com.

So whether you click on the tile on the Office 365 webpage or go straight to this address, it will take you into the Teams interface. And if I was not already signed into my Office 365 account, of course I would be asked to sign in when I go to this page. So here we can see the Teams interface. We'll take a tour of the interface and get familiar with the controls in just a moment but first the website is not the only place to access Teams. There's also a desktop application as well and, for what it's worth, at the time of this recording, the Teams website does not work in the Safari web browser, so if you are using a Macintosh, you need to either use a web browser other than Safari, like Google Chrome or Firefox, or you can use the desktop application.

So here on the website for Teams, there's a link to download the desktop application. You'll just go to the account button in the bottom left corner, click on that to open up this menu, and there's a link right here to download the desktop application. Or, if you do try to sign in to Teams using Safari on a Macintosh, it will just show you the link to download the application and you won't see the rest of the interface. Now I'm not going to go through this installation because I already have the desktop application downloaded and installed on this computer, so let's see that.

I'm going to go into my Start menu, I already have Teams installed, it's one of my recently added applications, so I'll just click on it to start it up there. I'll need to sign in to my account and now the application is running and from here, you'll find that the interface on the desktop application is almost identical to the interface on the web tool. There's really not much difference and as far as I can tell it boils down to whether you want Teams running as a window in your web browser or as a separate application and that's how you can access Teams on your computer.

Keep in mind that Teams is available as a mobile app for smartphones as well but we'll talk all about that in a separate chapter later in this course. Now before we move on, let's take a quick look at the interface in Teams, just to get settled. It's great that the web interface and the desktop application are nearly identical so we do not need to learn two different interfaces. You should start with the sidebar over on the left where you see these five buttons. Let me maximize this window to make it a little bit clear.

So these five buttons on the sidebar will take you to the different sections in the application. Up at the top you have Activity, this will show you a list of recent messages that you've sent or have been mentioned in. This is a feature that we will use a little bit but it's not a huge component. Next is Chats, this is where you can send messages to specific people. This is similar to instant messaging applications that you may have used in the past. The Teams section is where most of your work happens. You'll set up a group of teams here and you'll see group conversations organized here on this page.

Then there are Meetings which is where you can go to schedule video and audio calls with your teammates. And then Files is where you can see files that you've shared with your teammates, though most of the work with shared files will happen on the teams page. Clearly this course will be dedicated to learning all of the most important features in these different sections of the application. Then, of course, down at the bottom of the sidebar is your account menu. That's this button with either your Office 365 account picture or your initials.

If you open this, you get a menu where you get a bunch of options and settings. This is where you can go to sign out of your account if you need to do that and there are a bunch of other options that you can adjust which we'll cover later in this course as well. So now assuming your organization has an Office 365 business essentials, business premium, or enterprise deployment, you should be able to start working with Microsoft Teams and you've had your first look at the interface to start finding your way around. From here we can dive in and start learning how to work with Microsoft Teams.

If you are not able to sign in to Teams, you should work with your company's Office 365 administrator. There is a movie on administrator settings later in this course which may help your administrator get set up.