Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaborative workspace that brings together people, content, and conversations. With Teams, channels of colleagues or classmates can create content while collaborating with one another at the same time. Users can share files through Teams both internally and externally, and access their team files from the teams’ shared storage.

Teams’ powerful chat feature means that colleagues and classmates across the University can instantly communicate with one another through instant messaging and audio/video conferencing. Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are connected to Teams, similar to Slack. There are also mobile, desktop, and online versions of Teams.

Please see our Teams FAQ page, Getting Started guide, and Teams Quick Guide for more information.

With your OneDrive account, you can securely store all of your personal files in one place, easily share them with your colleagues and access them from any device. With OneDrive, you no longer need to email documents to yourself or save them to a USB key because all of your files are accessible anywhere. Please abide by UVic record management policies when using OneDrive. OneDrive is not a replacement for your department’s shared drive.

You can store and share up to 1 TB with OneDrive while creating, collaborating on, and editing Office 365 documents. With OneDrive, you can also:

• Control the sharing rights on your documents and access files remotely.
• Better collaborate with colleagues by editing and sending changes to OneDrive email attachments in real-time. There is no need to collate multiple recipients’ edits and comments.
• Keep track of document comments and edits in one place, not across multiple copies of a document.

Please see our OneDrive FAQ page and our Quick Guide for more information.

Microsoft Planner is a simple way to organize teamwork and manage tasks.  With Planner, you can bring teams, tasks, documents, and conversations together in one place. Use Planner to create a project plan, assign tasks to a team of individuals, and update the status of your tasks.

In Planner, each project can be organized visually with a plan board. Using the board, you can organize tasks into buckets, categorize tasks based on their status, and easily drag and drop tasks between columns.

Please see our Planner page for more information.

Microsoft Stream is a secure video service that allows you to share recordings of classes, meetings, presentations, training sessions, and related videos. It also works well with other Office 365 apps like Teams, OneNote, and Forms. With Stream, users can access their videos on multiple devices from any location and deliver both live and on-demand videos to curated audiences.

Stream also offers a number of features that will help you create and deliver engaging communications, meetings, training, and education. These features include:

• Speech to text and auto-generated closed captions.
• Flexible permission settings that allow users to share videos with specific groups, channels, and people.
• Custom video libraries that can be organized by audience and topic.
• Video commenting and time code tags to refer colleagues, students, or instructors to specific parts of videos.

Please see our Stream FAQ page and Quick Start Guide for more information.

With the Microsoft Forms tool, you can create surveys, polls, and formative quizzes – and easily see results as they come in. When you create a survey or form, you can invite others to respond to it using any web browser, even on mobile devices. As results are submitted, you can use the light-weight, built-in analytics to evaluate responses. Form data can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis.

The Microsoft Forms tool provides basic functionality for forms and surveys. It offers time-saving and efficient features, including:

• Re-usable template forms.
• The option to add pictures and videos to your survey.
• Collaborative design that allows you to co-edit forms with colleagues.

Data collected via the Forms tool is safe and secure as part of the Office 365 environment. Since the Forms tool is relatively simplistic in functionality, we recommend using alternatives for complex research activities. Forms should not be used to conduct high-stakes educational activities such as course evaluation and summative assessments.

See Microsoft’s Quick Start Guide for Forms.

If you have concerns or questions about using the Forms tool, please contact helpdesk@uvic.ca.

University of Victoria community members will also have access to these additional products. Click on the links to view the Microsoft quick guides.

• Lists
• Excel
• Word
• PowerPoint
• OneNote
• Staff Notebook
• Class Notebook (for class style teams)
• Assignments (for class style teams)
• Whiteboard