Calls: This lets you see contacts and create lists of speed-dial users/numbers (see Figure 1.5). You will also see a dial pad letting you dial phone numbers (assuming you are configured with the correct licensing, etc.). You used to only get the dial pad when your account was configured to use Microsoft Phone System, but now everyone should be able to see it as you can still “call” other users without going over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
Files: This shows you the most recent documents that you have been working on inside Teams along with any cloud storage providers that you have integrated (OneDrive will be the default here). This tab can act as a quick and easy way to continue working on whatever you were doing last (see Figure 1.6).FIGURE 1.5 Calls listFIGURE 1.6 Files list
Presence, settings, and tenants: At the top-right corner next to the minimize/maximize/close buttons you will see an icon for your user account with a colored dot. This dot is your presence indicator and usually automatically adjusts based on your activity and calendar information. You will see these colored dots in most places where you could be interacting with other users. Presence is core to what makes Teams a unified communications client and lets you (ideally) make smart decisions about how to contact someone. For example, there is little point calling them if they are already in a call or set to Do Not Disturb.
Your presence updates in near real time nowadays (this was not the case when Teams was first released) and can have the settings shown in Table 1.1.
TABLE 1.1 Presence Settings
| User Configured | Automatic |
|---|---|
| Available | Available |
| Available, Out of Office | |
| Busy | Busy |
| On a Call | |
| In a Meeting | |
| On a Call, Out of Office | |
| Do Not Disturb | |
| Presenting | |
| Focusing | |
| Away | Away |
| Away Last Seen <time> | |
| Be Right Back | |
| Off Work | |
| Offline | |
| Status unknown | |
| Blocked | |
| Out of Office |
docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/presence-admins
If you click your icon, you can manually override your automatic presence or access various application settings.
Next to your icon you might see the name of the tenant you are signed into. Each user has a “home tenant,” which is the O365 instance in which their account exists and is licensed for use with Teams. It is possible to be a member of more than one Teams tenant where you have been invited as a guest to work with other people. If you click here, you can swap in/out of these other tenants (but be careful because currently you will then miss any “activity” such as incoming calls, @-mentions, or messages happening in any tenant you are not active in until you switch back). See Figure 1.7.
FIGURE 1.7 Settings
While there is much more to explore in Teams, this section gave you enough of an idea of the basics to start using your own Teams tenant later in the book.
Accessing Teams
To familiarize yourself with how Teams works behind the scenes, and for the exercises that we are going to cover in this book, it is important you have access to a real Teams deployment where you can experiment. While you may have access to an O365 tenant through your company, it is probably not a good idea to be testing things in an environment that has live users on it.
Ideally, you will have access to an environment with a few test users and E3 licensing to make sure the majority of features are available. Depending on your circumstances you might have the following options available to you:
O365 E3 or E5 trial environment
Customer Immersion Experience (CIE)—Microsoft Partner demo environment
Fully paid E3 or E5 environment (but these usually have a minimum term!)
O365 E3 Trial
Microsoft does offer trial subscriptions for E3 (and E5, which is harder to find) from the E3 product overview page at microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/office-365-e3. You will be asked to enter some signup information but shouldn't need to enter any payment details unless you want to convert the trial into a full subscription. This trial should last for 30 days and let you have access to 25 licenses.
Customer Immersion Experience
If you work for a Microsoft Partner, you may have access to the Microsoft Partner demo site available at demos.microsoft.com. Here you can access temporary environments with full E5 licensing. These are intended for use by a partner organization to help run proof of concepts with their customers; however, you may also be able to use one for your own testing. After the trial period has expired, the tenant is deleted and reset. These environments can last for 90+ days.
Fully Paid E3
If you have the funds, or perhaps your company will support the expense as part of its training budget, you can sign up for a full-blown E3 tenant of your own. Be aware that this requires a full payment of a year up front.
Using Teams as Part of O365
O365 is a subscription service provided by Microsoft and includes elements of installable software (i.e., Word,