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The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has made us all reimagine our age-old workplace practices. Along with work-from-home options, many enterprises have chosen to move into a hybrid model where people might choose to work from the office and their home station alternately.
What facilitates these sorts of working structures are the online collaboration applications, such as Microsoft Teams. It is a virtual place where people can have their meetings, call and chat with each other, and collaborate on various other terms to get the work done with utmost efficiency and optimal resource utilization.
According to numbers available in the public domain, the number of Daily Active Users of Microsoft Teams worldwide has seen a phenomenal rise over the past few years. For instance, in 2017, Microsoft Teams had a Daily Active User base of only 2 million. That number increased to 75 million in 2020 with the surging spread of the Coronavirus Pandemic. In 2022, it increased to 270 million.
What Does Microsoft Teams Offer?
The growing adoption of Microsoft Teams has several driving factors. Apart from being a place for employees to collaborate seamlessly and engage, the platform also provides a range of resource utilization options.
For instance, to effectively share your work with your teammates, the platform allows you to share your screen on a run-time basis. It also allows you to set your background as per your choice so that the fact that you’re working from somewhere else does not create any unwarranted disruptions.
When it comes to making a call via Teams, the options are as robust as making calls from any other advanced device you might think of. For example, you can call a group, send voicemails, and even transfer your call as and when required.
Working together in the same place has many benefits. And Microsoft Teams ensures that there is no doing away with those benefits. You can share and edit files together online. And that includes working with your teammates on applications like MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Finally, communication through MS Teams is as fun as it can be. The MS Teams Chat functionality empowers you with the liberty to share your thoughts and personality. While chatting, you can send GIFs, stickers, and emojis as and when you choose to.
It is no wonder that a range of industries has chosen to leverage MS Teams across a variety of functional verticals. From Healthcare to Education, from Retail to Manufacturing – there is hardly any industry that can skip the MS Teams bandwagon. Apart from finding use in enterprise work, MS Teams has extensively been used for education and efficiently running community services. Security and Compliance, Distance Learning, Webinars – nothing has been out of MS Teams’ reach.
With surging adoption comes usability issues. Today we will discuss probably one of the commonest among them: how to keep teams status active.
But, before delving deeper into solving the issue, let us see how and why this issue is so common.
How to Keep Team Status Active?
Suppose, as a regular user of MS Teams, you’ve logged into it and been working on some different apps keeping the MS Teams window minimized. Once the app sees you idle for quite some time, it will change your status from active to away. The color will also change. In a way, this is a beneficial feature for the fact that it stops other users from getting an incorrect impression of what you are doing at that moment.
However, the problem occurs if the Away status persists and shows you away from the system even when you’re working, fully active, and fully available. For example, if you are working on an office assignment on MS Word and have kept the MS Teams browser minimized just for the sake of working comfortably on the Word file, the away status would carry a wrong meaning about your work status.
If this occurs multiple times, it will send an entirely wrong message about your utilization or productivity parameters. That’s why you must know how to keep the team status active, at least for as long as you’re doing office assignments, one or the other.
What you can do to solve this is to block the Microsoft Teams Away status. You can do this by going to your profile at the top right and clicking on “Set Status Message” to enter any message you would like to enter. Doing this would stop your Microsoft Team status from changing to Away.
However, there is one exception when this fix would not work. And it is when your system goes to sleep. There is a solution to this as well. You must open File explorer and paste a specific command on the location bar. Once the command is pasted, you can click on Change Plan Settings, following which you’ll be asked to select an option against the ‘Put the Computer to Sleep’ prompt. All you now need to do is select Never and save the change.
There are other ways to stop the system from going into idle mode. These hacks include keeping a media app on the system running. One can also run a mouse jiggler app which keeps the mouse active, eventually stopping the system from going idle. Keeping torrent downloads active could also be a solution.
If you want to know how to apply the above solutions in your system, go to this link which includes detailed, visual instructions of what we’ve discussed so far on how to keep the MS Teams status active.
