Other sides of this Point-Counterpoint:
For those unfamiliar with Microsoft Teams, it is a video conferencing platform that also has channels for communication, chats, and file sharing easily built in. It satisfies all the basic checkboxes. It has good audio quality, video and audio call capabilities, a chat feature for during calls, and screen sharing. What makes it exceptional for the purposes of school or work is the diverse functionality of MS Teams. This is what makes it an excellent all-in-one video conferencing tool.
Firstly, MS Teams is great because you can put everything there! In a group project or work team, set-up a team or channel within a team and you can dump all your files there. Since MS Teams is by Microsoft, which also developed OneDrive, you can easily sync the two together. You can upload Word documents, OneNote notebooks, links, PDFs, images and more into file tabs or pop them directly into a channel. How is this relevant to video conferencing? Well, what if something interesting is discussed during the meeting and you want to share it with everyone? Instead of e-mailing it to everyone, plunk it into the channel and people can easily access it. This also works with sharing files before meetings. No switching for any of this.
Piggy-backing off that last point, MS Teams allows real time editing of documents within OneNote. Technically, this is possible using Microsoft 365 or Google Suite already, but it’s particularly nice that it’s rolled up into one.
MS Teams has an undeniable professional atmosphere. No one uses it for just casual social media. This is advantageous because it’s easier to find information in a chat if you’re only sorting through project or course related stuff and not all the current events and memes. Even if you manage to segregate work and fun into different channels or chats on apps, it’s nice to have an app segregating your fun personal life with your education and not as fun work life.
You can also make a variety of teams and channels to sort your content even more!
For anyone who says that Microsoft made Skype and that sucks so why should Teams be good, I say: Microsoft abandoned Skype so they could make Teams, so it has to be better than Skype even for the mere reason that it’s been updated more recently.
One final and insignificant point is that Teams is purple, and I like that colour.
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