Speaker 1: The OneNote best practices video had an amazing response. So this video we are going to cover best practices for teams. The keyword here is simple best practices. No complexity, everything is common sense based and everything is customizable based on your requirements. When we do teamwork, we use teams. Obvious. There are two parts. There is work and there is team. So let's talk about work. What is work? There are different kinds of things we do. We call people, we chat with people, we have files, we have mails, we have meetings. Now each one of them requires different apps. Jumping from one app to another app to another app, juggling our life like this. Very boring. Very inefficient. Very confusing. What's the solution? Let's create one app which can actually help you do all these in a cohesive and simple manner and that is called teams. Now all these apps can be replaced with teams. So many apps, one team. Same way, when we talk about teamwork, there are many people involved. So bring those people to teams. So apps come to teams, one place. People come to teams, one place. So it's place for work. Think about it that way. Now let's look at teams from that point of view. The menu of teams is vertical on the left side, not on the top. Individual items in the menu can be rearranged, just drag and drop. Why would you want to do that? Because things which are important to you should be on top. Logical, common sense, logical. Not only that, there may be things which you don't need. Remove them. Right click and say unpin. And more importantly, click on the three dots. Remember in general, three dots means more potential benefits. Click on them. Look at the apps available. Find the ones which are relevant to you and add them. I will give you three apps which most probably are relevant to everyone. One, tasks. Because teamwork is what? Work. Work means tasks. Obviously you want tasks. So you always have tasks pinned there. Second, we do a lot of approvals and email based communication, attach files. That has a proper app within teams. So add approvals. Now whether you are a junior or a senior, either you are asking for updates or you are giving updates. So updates is another very interesting app added there. We'll make a separate detailed video on each app, but that's not important. Understanding what apps are available and which is relevant to me is the first step. Now before we go ahead, let me handle the irritants or complaints or common creeps about Teams. The first one is I cannot delete Teams chat. Fortunately now you can delete. Now although you can delete that chat, it is not really useful from a deletion point of view. Yes, it reduces your clutter, but if you think that chat is deleted in reality, no. As per the regulatory requirements or compliance requirements, chat as well as emails are archived for X number of years. In fact, chat as a part of corporate communication is a very powerful and useful thing. If you are using personal chat like WhatsApp, Telegram for corporate communication, don't do it. We have a detailed video explaining why Teams chat is better and why personal chat is bad for your benefit, customers benefit and company benefit. Oh, another irritant is when I finish a meeting, where is meeting in calendar when the meeting is over? Where does it land? Oh, it lands up in chat. Why does that happen? Well, we'll cover that a little later, but trust me, even though it's irritating, it is the best feature from collaboration point of view. Another issue is when I find something in teams, it shows me all over the place and I really can't find. So remember control F. So if I am in a chat and I want to search something in that chat or channel, press control F. Then it is contextual search problem solved. When you start using Teams, things will increase. More chat, more messages, more channels, more notifications. So there is a problem of many. There are two generic ways to handle many things. One approach is find what is important and pin it. So whether it is a chat message, whether it's a channel message, whether it is a chat itself, whether it is a file, everything which is important to you from a crowded thing can be pinned. The other thing is notifications. Too many notifications come, people get irritated, obviously. So as far as possible, all notifications should be off. Only things which are allowed to disturb you should be so important that they have the privilege to disturb you. So switch off all notifications and the only one I recommend you should enable is when someone mentions you by name. That means they need something only from you and that deserves to disturb you. Now teams can get very complex, but let me simplify it for you. Think, am I working with few people and I have something to get done, coordinate, finish it off. That's short term teamwork. That should be done in chat. Easy. Now, if it is something longer term, few people are involved, they are doing something which has a common objective, it's not getting over now, it'll go on and on. Maybe it's a project, maybe it's a recurring meeting, maybe it's a review, whatever. That kind of thing you do not do on group chat. You create a team in teams because that's long term and more structured. That's why we use teams inside teams. Now how to manage a group chat? That's easy. Everyone knows that. But there is one type of group chat which people are not using and they should be using and that chat is meeting chat. Whenever a meeting is over, it lands up in chat. Why does it happen? Because for meetings, we have hundreds of different apps. What do they do? Start meeting, end meeting, finish. No. Technically, the meeting is finished from the point of view of Google Meet or Zoom or WhatsApp or XYZ. But practically, from a business point of view, there will be something, some follow-up, some deliverable, some clarification, some update. How are you going to do that? None of those apps are going to help you. That's where teams help you by saying don't waste your life and don't trouble everyone else by sending them mails. Do that in teams because teams can do chat also. So teams will pick up the people who are part of the meeting, create a chat with exactly the same people. So what is our reciprocation? What should we learn from it? All the collaboration you want to do after the meeting, stop sending mails and start doing it in chat. Teach this to everyone around you. Life changes. Number of mails you receive dramatically reduces and you have clarity and better coordination. That's called efficiency. I'm sure you are finding something valuable, isn't it? So why don't you continue learning this by subscribing and clicking the bell icon? It's a good time to do that right now. So while we are talking about meetings, let me show you three things which are really good about meetings. Very often we are talking to people who are speaking in other language or they are speaking too fast or you are in a noisy environment and you can't hear what people are saying. In either case, enable transcription. So whatever the other party is seeing actually gets transcribed. So whatever Nathan is speaking is being shown here. And now there is another nice scenario. Maybe you're talking to your customer or vendor or supplier who understands a different language and they are talking in say German or French or whatever other language you don't understand that language. So when you enable transcription, there's a very, very difficult to notice three dots. So notice that three dots and there you can choose the language you understand. So maybe the other party is talking in English and you understand Hindi. It will live transcribe and translate in Hindi. It's an amazing feature. It's very difficult to discover because those three dots are almost never noticed by anybody. So now Nathan is still speaking in English, but assistant can now see this in Hindi. Another great feature which I use in every meeting is speaker coach. All the time we are speaking in meetings and we may not even notice that whatever we are speaking may become monotonous, may become repetitive, may be boring for other people. Nobody is going to tell you. Teams will tell you. So as soon as you start the meeting, enable speaker coach and then continue participating in the meeting as usual. Nothing new to be done. At the end of the meeting, it will show you a personalized dashboard which only you can see. Nobody else can see that. It's very protected from privacy point of view and there it will tell you what you can improve. It's an amazing feature. This is the best use of AI in a very silent manner, but it improves your life. And the other thing which is really new, which is new from email point of view as well as Teams chat is loop components. You can put a table in Teams chat and multiple people who are in the group chat can actually edit the table together like we edit a document. We have a separate video for that. Have a look at it. You will really love it. In fact, loop components are now available in Word as well. All right. Now let's talk about files. Where do you keep files? So concept. If I create a file and I'm going to primarily manage it and on demand, I'm going to share it with people. Put it on OneDrive. No question. No confusion. Now, if I want a file to be edited quickly by people, what do I do? I put them in a group chat. I put the file there. But very carefully, when I'm uploading the file, look at this option here. You should allow them to edit, otherwise they're going to make copies and there will be 5 copies of the file. Doesn't make sense. Allow them to edit. Allow whom to edit people who are currently in chat. Now everyone opens the file, edits it. It's still a single file. All changes are merged. That's called teamwork. When you create a team in Teams, that's where you do long term project management better. What should you do? You go to Teams, create a new team and add the same people which otherwise you would have added to the group chat. So what is wrong with chat? When you create a team, you get a container and there you can add anything which you need to manage that work. When do you use that for anything where same number of people are going to work on a long term basis for a common objective? When you create a team, you get channels. How many channels to create? It depends entirely on you. For example, I have a team for a department called procurement. Now they are all procurement people there. They are purchasing various things. So every RFP is a separate channel. Now I have another team for reviews. Review meeting happens every month. Now for every month I have a different channel. So depending on the situation, you create separate channels. Now what can you do in the channel? You can discuss, you can inform, you can clarify something which currently you are doing on email. Remember? So now no more emails, less effort on inbox and more clarity in Teams. Yes, discussion is OK. Now files. You can put files related to the project inside Teams. Remember, move the file from wherever it is. If the file was in OneDrive, but now you know it is for a project, do not keep it on OneDrive. Move it to Teams. If it's a new file, create it directly in Teams. If it's a file from local drive, don't keep that copy, move it to Teams. So that takes care of one copy of the file in the best place which the file deserves to be. How do you sync team files? Let me show you. Go to files area. There is a sync button, but do not click on that button. Go to the general channel first. You will see a sync button. Do not click on it yet. Look at the document section. That's one level above. Click on documents first, then sync. Why? Because every channel files will now sync on the local drive. Don't worry about disk space getting occupied because by default, the files are cloud only. That means the files names are getting synced. File will actually occupy space only when you double click on it. So only the files you need, you can double click, edit them offline and they will sync automatically and that is why this is better than file shares. OK, so so far so good. We are finished. No, we have just started. There are so many business requirements, every requirement cannot happen in Teams. You will require some other app for it and that's the best part of Teams. It's a container. You can add whatever you need to get your job done rather than jumping to that app. Bring that app to Teams. How do you do that? That is the plus sign. Most powerful button in Teams. Click on it. You will see lots and lots of icons. The top ones are Microsoft and below hundreds of them third party as well. Most IT people block all of this, which is really bad because why Microsoft has put it there because it must be useful to humanity. So why are you blocking it? Think. So what you should do is look at the list and see are there any of these things being already used officially for our business? If yes, encourage people to add them to teams so that they don't have to jump to SurveyMonkey. They don't have to jump to Jira or Azure DevOps or XYZ. In fact, the most commonly added item here is a task list because why it's a project. I need the task list. Now this task list which we added, what do you do with it? You add tasks, you put a deadline, you delegate it to people, and the best part is you can create categories or buckets. Everyone can see the status. So irrelevant review meetings saying what is happening, not required. Everyone can see what is happening live. You want to see your work as well as delegated work. That's why on the left side menu you should add tasks. Remember I told you in the beginning that shows you your work coming from Outlook tasks as well as project specific work coming from teams. And to do is also available as an app on mobile. So now it completes the story of my work, teamwork and proper efficient collaboration. I create so much content. I want maximum people to learn it, maximum people to benefit from it. That's why you should subscribe and click on the bell icon. You will be notified immediately when you click on the like button. It's not only I who understand it, YouTube understands that this was useful. It's going to show it to more people. So by you clicking on the like button, more people are benefiting. And finally, there is a new feature YouTube has introduced called thanks or super thanks. Click it and see what you can do with it. The idea is I'm trying to make 1 billion people more efficient. I'm not doing this for money, but even to reach those many people and to teach them so many topics does require funding. That's where you can thank me and contribute to this effort. So that's it for now. Thank you. Bye-bye.