Office 365 offers a number of products and connections to other products—many of which aren’t owned by Microsoft. In the past, it may have felt like your organization was better off sticking to one company’s products for simplicity. In fact, the best thing about Microsoft products is the integration story behind them. But the reality is, this shouldn’t limit you to their products.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a tool that unifies much of Office 365—a single UI that connects them all. One potential source of frustration, particularly for those who are new to the suite of products, is figuring out where everything is. Teams helps alleviate this by providing one place to view SharePoint and OneDrive content, read emails, chat, and schedule (and hold) meetings. It does a solid job of integrating the Office 365 suite of apps. But what happens if you prefer other products over their Office 365 counterpart? What then?
Use Case
Microsoft tends to introduce products with a plan to continually improve them. In other words, they’ll release an app that “competes” with other products, but lacks the features to convince you to make the switch. Consider Trello vs Planner. Maybe you like Trello’s integration points with other products, or maybe you simply prefer its user experience. You want to keep using Trello, but how?
Adding Trello to Teams
When you visit a Team, start by clicking on the “+” sign below your Team title bar to create a new Tab.
A popup will appear that lists a slew of apps you can create tabs for, and a handy search bar to help you find the one you want to use.
Select “Trello” and the following popup appears, which displays the features you’ll get.
Next, you’ll be asked to login. Click the “Log in with Trello” button, provide your username and password, and click “Save.”
Once you’re logged in, select the Board you want to see in the Teams tab. Once you’ve made your selection, click “Save.”
Finally, a new Tab with the name of your Trello board appears, right within your Team, along with the full functionality of that board.
Teams also creates an update where you can link to the new tab and start a conversation.
Conclusion
Teams is a great tool for consolidating your content and tools. Just because you may work in a “Microsoft shop,” doesn’t mean you’re forced to use their tools. There are perfectly valid reasons to use non-Microsoft products and Microsoft graciously provides the means to integrate them into their products. Office 365 is about helping businesses and individuals become more productive, even if that means using outside products.
For more information about how you can use Teams, SharePoint, or other Office 365 products to improve productivity, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Anexinet.
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