Microsoft Teams have many features, below we give a brief overview of the main ones that can help your business.

• Audio and video conferencing with a large number of participants
• Text chat, allowing participants to interact, ask questions, and share files. This is particularly useful for meetings where attendees are restricted from sharing audio or video.
• Screen sharing, allowing the broadcast of your desktop screen or a specific application, like PowerPoint or your web browser. The ‘Give Control’ feature also allows you to temporarily grant control of your PC to another participant – useful for joint presentations. Teams also allows you to upload PowerPoint slides directly into the meeting so you can share a presentation without streaming a live view of your PC screen (ideal for low-bandwidth situations).
• Microsoft Whiteboard can be generated during meetings and collaboratively edited with participants. The whiteboard is available to participants after the meeting via the chat channel under the ‘More’ option.
• Polls can be created by using the Microsoft Forms integration. In Chat, type ‘@Forms’ to create multiple choice polls for participants. Participants can respond anonymously, and results can be shared with the group.
• Meeting recording can be initiated, allowing you to save meetings in your QMUL OneDrive account. Recordings can be downloaded and shared using your QMplus Media account or embedded within a QMplus module.
• Breakout rooms can divide participants into smaller groups. During breakout sessions, participants can be granted features not permitted in the main room, such as the ability to share audio, video, and their screens. Breakouts can be manually managed or controlled with a pre-determined time limit.
• Reactions allow participants to visually communicate with the Host by selecting options such as ‘Raise Hand’ to indicate a question, which highlights a participant on the screen with the raised hand icon. Others include ‘laughing’ and ‘applause’ to allow for quick interactions with the Host without requiring audio or chat features.
• Live Captions – Teams can generate live ‘machine-generated’ captions during a session. The transcript of recorded sessions can also be downloaded, allowing viewers to search for keywords or follow the text from the meeting audio.
• User roles – each meeting has an ‘Owner’ who controls access to features such as audio, video, and screen sharing. For large sessions, you may choose to create a meeting lobby, limit access to presentation tools, or disable the meeting Chat. Teams meetings created via Outlook have a ‘Meeting options’ link to adjust these settings in advance, or they can configured during a meeting under the ‘More actions’ menu.
• Meeting notes can be generated for each meeting under the ‘More actions’ menu. This allows any members of the meeting to make notes which are saved and accessible to participants after each session. If using a recurring meeting space, meeting notes can be collaboratively edited over time.