In this instructional video, Randy Dean demonstrates how Microsoft Teams tabs can be used to embed a wide range of Microsoft 365 applications, third‑party services, and external websites directly within a Teams channel. He walks through adding a Whiteboard tab, embedding an HTTPS website, creating file‑based tabs (showing that a Word tab requires a Word document in the channel while an Excel tab can be added from an existing spreadsheet), and exploring the extensive catalog of integrated apps—including Salesforce, Asana, Trello, Adobe Sign, SurveyMonkey, Box, and many more. Dean highlights the strategic shift in Microsoft’s approach: instead of forcing users to adopt Microsoft‑only tools, Teams now embraces competitors, allowing users to bring their preferred third‑party solutions into the workflow. He offers practical tips for discovering and adding apps via the “More Apps” menu, emphasizes the importance of HTTPS for website tabs, and promotes his own e‑learning program “Beyond Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams,” offering additional tip sheets and training resources.
Chapters
Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, email sanity expert. Uh, just wanted to, as you can see, casual day in the office today, but wanted to do a quick little follow-up video to yesterday's video I did on how I was using multiple functions in Microsoft 365 for managing my project. Uh, link in the video or in the comments below. But on this one, yesterday I sort of inferred about a little bit of this. I want to just show you something super cool inside of Microsoft Teams in that you can access a whole bunch of the Microsoft Office apps, the 365 apps, even third-party apps and websites utilizing the tabs in Microsoft Teams. So let's talk about this. Um, it's, it's a big change. I can't stress how much of a big change it is, especially the third-party piece. Let me show you what I mean. You can actually customize these tabs in Teams to meet your needs with that team or that channel or that activity or project. So let's go into my Microsoft Teams here real quick, and I want to show you something that's sort of cool. Um, so if I go into my Teams, uh, what you can see is if I go down— yesterday I did my daughter's grad party, um, and so let me bring this one up. And what I want to show you here is that Obviously you can make tabs, and I talked in a previous video about the wiki. You can see that in the comments below. Yesterday I sort of talked about To Do by Planner and how to do that in yesterday's video underneath this, but I wanted to show you this. One of the things that they've added in is the whiteboard inside of Teams, and I just went out and actually added the tab for whiteboard. And what it does is it gives you a fully functional whiteboard that you can actually utilize to run a whiteboard activity when you are working on your Teams. If it loads— there we go. And as you can see, so I was just playing around. You got your drawing tools up here. You can drop in some regular text. You can drop in a little bit of a note, all this kind of stuff. And obviously, you know, if you're doing this on a live team and you've given other people access, you could have multiple people doing, you know, an active live brainstorm while you're doing this. And all I had to do to add the whiteboard was come in and hit Add a Tab. But This is where you'll go to set up a whole bunch of this stuff. So as you can see right now, it's loading up some of the things. And one of the ones that I recently did was whiteboard. Let me show you another thing you can do. You can bring in a website. So let's drop out of here. And I wanted to show you something. So I came down here into my online e-learning efforts. And on the inside of this, under the General tab, I believe it was, let me see. My eLearning Site. So I added a tab up here, My eLearning Site. All I did was went in and I selected website. And then if I go into this tab, let me just show you what this does. This is sort of cool. It actually allows you to drop in the link to an active website and it works. You can go to this website. Now, one thing that I noticed though when I was doing this It's only going to allow you to use sites with HTTPS, so the secure sites. So if it's just an HTTP site, I tried one of those, it didn't load. But if you're going to a site that has the little S as part of the URL, you're in business and you can actually have the site inside of the tab. It's basically what they've done with these tabs is they've turned them into browsers. And you can actually use this to get out and access some stuff. Now, related to that, what's interesting is if you take a look at this, you can also— let's go back to Grad Party because I want to show you something that's interesting. And I learned a little nuance on this. One of the things that you can actually do inside of here is notice that there's a whole slew of tools that are in here that you could use, many of which are Microsoft. OneNote, Excel, um, PowerPoint, SharePoint, um, Word. Now what was interesting though, uh, is that when I went in to do this, I tried to add a Word tab and I— it wouldn't let me. And the reason it wouldn't let me add the Word tab in— little watch out for you— is take a look at this. Under Files, if I go in Files in this one I don't have any Word documents. I think you need to load the file of that type into this, you know, uh, channel before you can then create a tab for the channel. Because notice that I have an Excel spreadsheet in here, and if you take a look, watch what I can do now. I can come in under the tab and add now an Excel tab. And if I do this Excel spreadsheet. And if I do that and I put it under Hallie Grab Party Checklist, I can hit save. And now what's going to happen is it's going to create an Excel spreadsheet tab of that spreadsheet. So if that all makes sense. But the thing is, is that you can actually set these things up so that you can go in and have these things easy to launch. Like I said, I was taking a look at it SharePoint, OneNote, Word, Excel, Forms, PowerPoint, all of those sort of traditional Microsoft Office tools, as well as some of the newer cloud-based 365 tools. You can actually build those right into, you know, some of the, you know, channels inside your Teams. Now related to that though, here's where things get real interesting and a little bit different. Not only can you do a website, Not only can you do some of these Microsoft, um, Office-type apps as tabs— look at this, this is where it gets real cool and very different from Microsoft's traditional model. I'm going to open yet another new tab. Now I, I want you to notice some things in here right off the bat. YouTube— wait a minute, that's Google. That's interesting. Um, Visio, uh, you know, there's, there's some interesting things that are going on in here. And now what I want you to do is take a look at this. Uh, so I went in and took a look and I paged down. Now if you page down, there's a whole bunch of stuff you could bring in here. Adobe, Adobe Sign. Ah, interesting. Now I was taking a look and there's like, you know, CRM tools in here. Like, um, you know, I was looking Salesforce, Zoho, um, you know, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics. Of course they're going to have their own product in there. But here's where the change is really big and different, is that, you know, um, obviously, you know, when you're doing something like this, SAP, um, that's interesting. Microsoft has decided at this point they can't dominate, they need to collaborate at least somewhat. The traditional model for years and years was if they saw a competitor, they would build a competitive product to dominate. With this model, they're acknowledging that there's other third-party tools that are out there that their clients are actively using to get work done. And rather than force them to, or at least try to force them to use the Microsoft product, they're saying, you know what, eh, we know you're going to use things like Asana, right? So since you're going to use Asana, let's make it so you can actually bring it right in. Or Trello, you know, I'm just thinking of some of the ones that I know my clients and partners use, uh, Wrike, you know, these are all project management tools. Monday, you know, um, all of these are tools that I know that a bunch of my clients are using and they're saying, well, we, we want to make this stuff incorporate, you know. I mean, if you take a look at this, you know, how many of you are using Salesforce? I mean, look at that, you can bring Salesforce in as a tab inside of your Teams. And so that brings up the possibility that you could use this for um, fairly sophisticated client management because you could set up a tab or actually a team for one of your key clients with channels for different parts within that client operation or effort and have your Salesforce built right in. That's cool. And it's a big deal because, like I said, they're not making you use Dynamics. Like they tended to have a history of doing. They're not making you use Microsoft Project. Now those are available, you can use them, they're not forcing you to use them, which is the big change. And so, uh, you know, I, I think that this sort of shows that they've acknowledged that, you know, in order for them to be successful, uh, moving forward in this new world, that they can't try to run everything all the time. You know, and, and, you know, one of the things I just recommend you do is go into the tabs and go down and take a look at the different apps that are available. You know, like I was, I was in here taking a peek at this thing. And when you click on the new tabs, notice that you can actually come down here and see all of the different tools that are available. You know, I saw things like SurveyMonkey and Box and, um, you know, just a whole bunch of stuff that I know people are using. But then what you can do is come in and hit More Apps, and it's going to bring up the entire checklist of everything that they're basically supporting inside of here. Now notice that a lot of them are Microsoft, Power Automate, Power Apps, Microsoft Project. But if you take a look, there's a lot of other stuff in here that isn't necessarily Microsoft that a lot of you are using. I would just go in and take a look, see what else is in there. And keep going down, and you're going to find out, you know, what's available. And if you're using something, I would actually recommend you go in and search to see if that third-party tool is supported inside of your Teams tabs. And the benefit of this— I mean, obviously, you know, you could set up a dual monitor or triple monitor system and set up at your primary workstation and have it running on the second screen, but sure is nice to be able to just open it up and see it in one panel, one screen, if you're working in that, when you're working in it. So thought you'd find this interesting, valuable, important. I think it's huge. I actually think it's a big— like I said, it's a big change that really makes it a difference for people that are utilizing some of these different tools. And it really allows you to customize that, um, Microsoft Teams environment to fit what it is you're actively doing on your team or in your business or with your group, um, for project, event, client, customer activity management. So hope you found this useful. Um, hope you'll excuse the casual, but hey, you know, it's a day I got to get out and get some more work done on that grad party I was talking about yesterday. If you'd like to find out more about, uh, who I am and what I do, um, including, uh, full-length programs— I'm making a bunch of my Microsoft Teams and related videos, part of a full-length program training that I've just added out to my e-learning channel called Beyond Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. If you'd like to learn more about that, go out to my website, uh, either click on the programs channel, or especially if you want to see that program, click on the e-learning channel. Obviously, if you like these videos, please like, please subscribe, please make comments. Want to make this a more interactive environment. And if you'd like to get a whole slew of bonus little tip video, uh, PDF tip sheets, things like that, uh, send me an email, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you some, uh, tip sheets and, uh, links to some of my more popular YouTube videos on Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Gmail and Google Suite users, smartphone and tablet usage, how to reduce your distractions, how to better work from home. I'll just send you a whole bunch of stuff, and you can basically spend the next several months doing a bunch of self-study on these things. So hope you found this useful. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week. Bye now.
