Microsoft Teams

Y F Lai, Head of Infrastructure Systems

Many of our users may only know Microsoft Teams as a Zoom alternative for video conferencing. In fact, Microsoft Teams does a lot more than this. It is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage (including collaboration on files), and application integration. Teams is integrated with the Office 365 productivity suite and other features extensions can integrate with non-Microsoft products.


From our experience, Teams' channel is particularly useful in the workplace to replace emails as the collaboration tool. Traditionally, email inboxes are chronological list of messages, where you need to switch your brain back and forth between projects you're on, previous conversations, company announcements and external messages. Teams is not going to reduce the workload in this context, but by having your work already divided into Channels around a topic or project, you can reduce the need to switch your cognitive context. The chats, files, tasks, and meetings for a project are stored in one place. You can review project by project quickly and conveniently.


​​​​​​​Do trial Microsoft Teams next time when you need to start a new project and collaborate with colleagues. See if it makes a difference in efficiency to your project. For more information about Teams, please visit the website: https://itsc.ust.hk/services/general-it-services/communication-collaboration/microsoft-teams