Microsoft Teams is designed to help Office customers work as a team together. It’s one app that aims to bring team’s conversations, meetings, files, and notes into a single place for open and seamless collaboration. While most are ready to embrace the change, they are struggling to get started. Here’s a post that will show you how to enable & activate Microsoft Teams via Office 365 Admin Center. This post will also show you how to follow conversations and manage notifications.

Activate Microsoft Teams

For activating Microsoft Teams, you can use the Office 365 Admin Center. The Office 365 Admin Center is used to set up your organization in the cloud, manage users and manage subscriptions.

To get to the Admin Center, chose the app launcher and select ‘Admin’ from anywhere in Office 365. This will take you to ‘Admin Center’ home page. Please note that Admin Tile appears only to Office 365 administrators. Plus, administrators are allowed to control access to Microsoft Teams only at the organization level. User-level control is not available yet. It will be available soon. Once, it is made available, you will have the option to either turn on or turn off the Microsoft Teams license for individual users.

Coming back, choose ‘Get the Setup’. Do this and you are ready to manage Office 365 apps like Microsoft Teams.

Before you activate Microsoft Teams, you should enable and configure Microsoft Teams for your organization by signing in to Office 365 with your work or school account.

So choose Admin to go to the Office 365 admin center.

Now, choose ‘Settings’ and select ‘Services & add-ins’.

When taken to ‘On the Services’ & ‘add-ins page’, choose Microsoft Teams.

Next, on the Microsoft Teams settings page that opens, click or tap to switch the toggle to the ‘On’ position to turn on Teams for your organization, and then choose Save.

That’s it!

On a side note, Microsoft Teams users can choose to complete tasks such as querying information and performing commands by using BOTs. Moreover, they can integrate their existing LOB applications with it.

To turn on or turn off any built-in bots, in the Bots section of the Microsoft Teams settings page, click to switch the toggle next to Enable bots in Microsoft and then select Save option.

After you have Microsoft Teams set up, you can manage Microsoft Teams from their admin console and start following conversations and manage notifications.

Follow Conversations & Manage Notifications in Microsoft Teams

The very first step to follow a conversation is to ‘favorite’ a channel. This is easy, and once you do it, it’ll stay visible in your team list. From within the channel, just click ‘The favorite’ icon adjacent to the channel name.

How to check if a channel is active? Simple, look for the channels that appear in bold since, a bold channel is an active channel. Any new messages coming under channels will make it appear in bold.

Besides, you’ll also receive notifications when someone @mentions you or replies to a conversation you’re in.

To verify if conversations include you, look for a red circle over the image of bell icon. You will also see a number marking next to the bolded channel name, which indicates you are included in that channel.

To ensure other people in a team channel can see your message, @mention them (just type @ before a name and pick the right person from the picker).

Instantly, the selected person will get a notification in their activity list next to the channel you mentioned them in.

Managing Notifications

You can manage notifications from the Settings section. Just click the button at the bottom left, and choose Notifications.

There, you can configure options to change your notification settings for mentions, messages, and more.

For limiting the number of notifications you receive, click ‘Settings’ icon and chose ‘Notifications’.

Thereafter, select how you would like to get notified of mentions, messages, and more.

That’s it! A number in red corresponding to a channel highlighted in bold will always notify you whenever you are mentioned in a channel. Also, if you are not logged into Microsoft Teams, it will send an email notification to alert you about any missed activity!

This chat-centered workspace in Office 365 is quite different from Office 365 Groups. This service offers cross-application membership which will allow individuals to have access to shared assets of an Office 365 Group. For more information on this, you can visit Office.com.