Published: 2 June 2026 | By AOLC
Microsoft Teams is installed on the computers of millions of South African workers — but most businesses use it for little more than chat and the occasional video call. That is a significant waste. A typical Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium subscription includes dozens of Teams features that can genuinely transform how your team communicates, collaborates, and gets work done. The good news: you do not need to buy anything extra. The features covered in this guide are included in the plans most South African businesses already have.
According to Microsoft's own usage data, the average Teams user actively uses fewer than five of the application's features. For South African businesses still finding their feet with hybrid and remote work — a shift accelerated by years of load shedding forcing teams to work from home — this represents a real missed opportunity. Below are the 10 features AOLC most commonly finds switched off or overlooked when onboarding new Microsoft 365 clients.
A Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription costs approximately R185 per user per month in South Africa. If your team is only using it for email and basic chat, you are leaving significant value — and productivity — on the table.
Microsoft Loop components let you embed live, collaborative content directly into a Teams chat or channel message. Think of it as a shared bullet list, task tracker, or table that updates in real time for everyone in the conversation — no need to open a separate document or share a link. For teams that coordinate projects over chat, this is genuinely useful: you start a Loop component in a message, and every participant can edit it simultaneously without leaving the conversation. Loop components also sync across Microsoft 365 apps, so the same content can appear in Outlook, OneNote, and Teams at the same time.
Most businesses add external parties — clients, auditors, suppliers — to their Teams environment as "guest users." The problem with this approach is that guests have to switch between their own Microsoft tenant and yours every time they want to participate. Shared Channels solve this. A Shared Channel lets an external collaborator join a specific channel using their own Microsoft account, without being granted access to the rest of your environment. It is cleaner, more secure, and more privacy-friendly under POPIA because you are not giving external parties access to your full tenant. External participants see only the channel they have been invited to — nothing else.
Most Teams users know you can @mention a person to send them a notification. Fewer know you can create custom tags — like @Accounts, @SupportTeam, or @Management — and @mention those tags to notify an entire group at once. This solves the common frustration of posting in a channel and nobody seeing it. Rather than blasting everyone on the team, you notify only the relevant group. Tags are set up in the Teams admin settings and can be managed by team owners or administrators.
The average number of Teams features actively used by most employees — out of dozens available in a standard Microsoft 365 subscription.
Teams can automatically transcribe your meetings and generate a structured recap — including a summary, identified action items, and key discussion topics. For hybrid teams where some people attend in person and others join remotely, this means no one misses context. People who could not attend can catch up without watching a full recording. Important for South African businesses: meeting transcriptions that capture personal information about employees have implications under POPIA. Before enabling transcription by default, update your employment contracts or IT acceptable use policy to inform employees that meetings may be recorded — this is both a legal best practice and an important element of workplace trust.
Breakout Rooms let the meeting organiser split all participants into smaller groups mid-meeting for focused discussions, then pull everyone back to the main meeting when done — exactly like a physical workshop breakout. Most South African businesses running training sessions, workshops, or strategic planning days use separate meeting links for each group, which creates confusion and coordination problems. With Breakout Rooms, the whole event stays in a single meeting. Organisers can pre-assign participants to rooms or let Teams assign them randomly, and they can broadcast messages to all rooms simultaneously.
Every Teams meeting includes access to Microsoft Whiteboard — a digital canvas where all participants can sketch diagrams, map processes, and brainstorm together in real time. For businesses that currently book a physical room just to use a whiteboard, this is a direct replacement that works equally well for remote and hybrid sessions. Whiteboards save automatically to your Microsoft 365 environment and can be shared as a link after the meeting, so there is no more photographing a whiteboard and emailing the photo around.
The Polls app in Teams — powered by Microsoft Forms — lets you create polls before a meeting and launch them live during the session. Use it for quick decisions, temperature checks, training knowledge assessments, or gathering anonymous feedback from staff during town halls. If you have ever tried to run an interactive all-hands meeting and resorted to asking people to type +1 in the chat, this is the upgrade you need. Polls results are visible in real time and can be exported to Excel after the meeting for further analysis.
Microsoft Planner is included in most M365 plans and integrates directly into Teams as a tab inside any channel. Your team can create tasks, assign owners, set due dates, add checklists, and track progress — without ever leaving Teams. For South African businesses currently managing project tasks via WhatsApp groups, shared spreadsheets, or scattered emails, this is a zero-cost upgrade that is already sitting inside your subscription. Each Teams channel can have its own Planner board, keeping tasks contextually organised alongside the conversations that created them. When a task is completed, it shows up in both Teams and the Planner web app automatically.
The additional cost to enable all 10 features listed here. They are already included in Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium plans.
The Teams Approvals app turns informal approval requests into formal, auditable workflows. Instead of a WhatsApp message that says "please approve this quote before I send," a staff member submits an approval directly in Teams — attaching the relevant document, specifying the approver, and setting a deadline. The approver receives a notification, reviews the attachment, and approves or rejects with a comment. Every approval is logged, timestamped, and searchable. For businesses that need to demonstrate governance — particularly those operating under POPIA, ISO standards, or internal audit requirements — this is a practical way to create an approval trail without implementing expensive workflow software.
Microsoft Power Automate — also included in M365 plans — can use Teams as a trigger or a notification hub for automated workflows across your Microsoft 365 environment. Some practical examples that South African businesses use today: automatically post to a Teams channel when a new SharePoint document is uploaded; notify a manager when a staff member submits a form response; send a Teams message when a ServiceDesk ticket is created; or alert the finance team when an Approvals request is pending for more than 48 hours. The barrier to setting up basic flows is low — Microsoft provides dozens of pre-built templates — and no coding is required for most common scenarios.
The barrier to adopting these features is almost never cost — it is awareness, configuration, and training. Here is a practical checklist to get started in your organisation:
Tip
Before enabling meeting transcription across your organisation, check your employment contracts and IT acceptable use policy. Employees should be informed in writing that meetings may be recorded and transcribed — this is both a POPIA best practice and essential for maintaining workplace trust.
Getting value from Microsoft 365 is not about buying more licences — it is about using what you already have. If your business is paying for M365 and your team is still managing tasks on WhatsApp, running workshops with no structure, and sharing files over email, the tools to fix every one of those problems are already sitting inside your Teams application. They just need to be switched on.
AOLC helps South African businesses configure and adopt Microsoft 365 properly — not just deploy it and walk away. Our managed IT service includes M365 optimisation as standard, because a tool your team does not use is a tool you are paying for twice.
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