There are a lot of tools we use at work that are silly overkill in your personal life – I don’t want to open a Remedy ticket for every squeaky hinge! But some of our tools are quite helpful away from work too – making flyers in Word or using Excel to keep track of the softball league standings. “Is Teams useful in my personal life” seems like a purely hypothetical question – it’s not like I can invite the rest of the Parent Teacher Organization to join us here in Teams (and even if I could, that’s hardly an appropriate use of company resources!). But did you know Microsoft offers a free version of Teams?

Signing up for a free account, you don’t get access to all of the Teams features we’ve got here – you cannot schedule meetings, record meetings, there isn’t a Planner board, you don’t have access to the full suite of Office 365 applications. But you do have a Teams space, can use the integrated apps and connectors, have some file storage space, have persistent chats in channels, and can even have group audio/video calls.

To sign up for a free Teams account, visit https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free

Don’t use your company e-mail address to sign up – this will need to be your personal address.

If you don’t already have a Microsoft account associated with the e-mail address, you’ll be asked to create a new Microsoft account.

Otherwise you’ll be asked to sign in to your Microsoft account.

Supply your name, organization name, and country of origin. Read the terms of use and privacy statement. Assuming your use complies with the terms of use and the privacy policy is acceptable, click “Next”

It will take a few minutes for everything to be set up. Once your personal Teams organization is built, you can invite others to join. Click on your avatar in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and select “Manage org”

Click “Invite others to your org”

And enter their e-mail addresses

They will get an e-mail message inviting them to join your Teams org.

You’re ready to start using Teams – add tabs to websites your group commonly uses, set up connectors, create new channels, chat, video calls, share files. You can even add new Teams to your organization.

Everyone added to your org is automatically able to access the default Teams space (the one with the name of your org). Teams spaces you create can be private or public, just like at work – but you can also select “Org-wide” which automatically joins any newly-added individuals to the Teams space.

One drawback to retaining all of your chat and team discussion content is that there’s a LOT of content … which makes it challenging to find a specific discussion or comment. Luckily, Teams data is easily searched. At the top of your Teams application (or website), there is a long gray bar. Click in it and type a word or phrase to begin searching. Using multiple words will find conversations containing both words, to find a phrase place the phrase “in quotes”. Hit enter.

You’ll see messages that contain the words or phrase – notice this includes both chat messages and channel discussions. Each search result has a reference letting you know where the discussion is located, and you can click on the item to switch to the chat or channel discussion.

If your search returns too many results, click on the little funnel – you can refine your search results with a filter – a specific individual, a time frame.

In addition to searching chat messages, you can search files. Just click on “Files” and you’ll see files with names or content that contain your search terms. Again, you can see where the file is located, and you can click on the file to preview the file.

Click on “People” and you’ll find, well, people who work here. This is a name search – you cannot search for “stats” and see people with whom you’ve had discussions about statistics. Search for a last name, a first name, or a name in “last, first” format.

If you click on a person, you’ll see the conversations you have had with them, as well as any shared files, an org chart for their position in the company, and their channel posts for the past two weeks (‘Activity’).

If you haven’t chatted with them before, you can start a new conversation too.

There are times when it is easy to tell who is speaking – there aren’t a lot of women in my group, so “the female voice” is usually me. My friend Richard is generally the only person with a New Zealand accent on any call (although someone who didn’t grow up in a Commonwealth country may have trouble distinguishing him from the guy from Australia). And after you work with someone for a while, you learn the voice and lexical nuances of colleagues. The rest of the time? I end up pausing the conversation to check who it was that volunteered to serve as my tester and clarify who is going to be getting back to me next week. In a Teams meeting, though, you can quickly tell who is speaking – and respond with a much friendlier “thanks, Jim, for offering to help”.

When you join a Teams meeting, you’ll see up to four large tiles with meeting participants. If there are more than five participants (you don’t show up on your own view!), the remaining people will be represented by smaller images in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

When someone is speaking, their tile will be highlighted in a purply-blue and a brighter highlight circumscribes their image.

The four large tiles represent the most recent speakers, so you will notice who is in these four tiles change throughout the call. And, yeah, it’s possible for more than one person to be talking at a time – you’ll have multiple highlighted tiles.

There is another place to view who is speaking. On the right-hand column, click to enter the participant pane.

The current speaker will be bolded.

Bonus Features: Sometimes I’ll start a large call and have trouble getting everyone’s attention to start the call. In the participant pane, you can click “Mute all” to mute all participants. N.B. Any participant can do this – so don’t test it in the middle of a real discussion!

And just like meetings through the PSTN system or other web-meeting platforms, you’ll get the occasional person typing without hitting mute. Or speaking to someone who popped into their office. Or experiencing feedback on the connection. In Teams, it’s easier to identify who is causing a disruption – they are going to be highlighted as speaking.

Once you’ve identified the source of the noise, click the not-quite-a-hamburger-button next to their name and select “Mute participant”.