Microsoft Teams or “TEAMS” is a business communication app or platform and service developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. TEAMS competes with similar services such as Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration.
Figure 1: Welcome to TEAMS
- Firstly, TEAMS is a chat-based collaboration platform complete with document sharing, meeting capabilities, and many more features.
- Secondly, TEAMS is to be used for collaboration (that is, co-authoring on documents, video, or audio-only meetings, chatting and general engagement...), on live and ongoing campaigns, projects, tasks etc., and not necessarily a document store, repository, or archive.
- Thirdly, A team in TEAMS has its connected SharePoint Online site that is hosted in the Microsoft cloud. SharePoint Online team sites are for medium-term storage and collaboration (not for archiving or personal documents).
From a user’s point of view, the TEAMS app could be broken down into four main parts, that being “Teams”, “Channels”, “Conversations”, and “Meetings”.
- A Team is a container (with or without Branding) for a collection of Channels and their resources (SharePoint Online site…). You can have multiple teams – Private or Public in TEAMS.
- A Channel is a single place for a team to share messages, tools (apps), and files. A collection of channels makes a team.
- Meetings in TEAMS can be achieved through "Meet now", "Schedule a meeting" & Outlook: "New Teams Meeting".
- “Conversations” (or Chats) and “Announcements” are ways to collaborate with your team through messaging. They exist in the "Posts" tab.
Figure 2: A Team and nested Channels
A Team - Container (with branding) for a collection of channels and their resources
- ?Create a Team (or channel) only if you need it. Remove inactive teams.
- Announce that you have created a team by email, in TEAMS or your Collaborative team site.
- When creating a Team, you can make it “Public – Anyone in your organization can join” or “Private – Only Team owners can add members”. You may change the Team's "Privacy" after it had been created.
- When a Team is created, it has the default "General" channel that is a “Public” channel (you cannot change this channel to Private.)
- You may leave a Team when it is Private (unless you are the last owner). You cannot leave a Public Team as it is already Public and open. You may turn off notifications for a “Public” Team, however.
- When a Team is inactive for 30 days, it is put in a "soft-deleted" state (or deleted). The Team, it's content (documents) and the SharePoint sites are sent to the Recycle Bin where you can recover it. After another 30 days, it will be "hard-deleted" state where you cannot recover it, i.e., it is deleted permanently.
- When you apply an expiration policy to a Team, a Team owner receives a notification for team renewal 30 days, 15 days, and 1 day before the team's expiration date. When the team owner receives the notification, they can click Renew now in team settings to renew the team.
A Channel - A single place for a team to share messages, tools, and files
- ?When you "Add channel" or create a channel (in a Team) you make it visible and Public - "Standard - Accessible to everyone on your team" or "Private - Accessible only to a specific group of people within the team". “Private” channels have a padlock icon and are hidden and not searchable. “Private” channels are invisible in SharePoint by default.
- It is not possible to opt-out of a “Public” channel as it is already open. You can turn off notifications for "Channel notifications". You can leave a “Private” channel when you are an owner (unless you are the last owner), member, or guest.
- After you have created a channel, you cannot change its privacy. You will have to create a new channel with new privacy and delete the old one.
- When you delete a channel, the Channel's folder along with its documents are left intact on the SharePoint site, however.
Conversations – “Conversations” (or Chats), “Announcements” in the "Posts" tab
- When you create a "New conversation" (or Chat), you can change it to an "Announcement" to make it more visible (searchable and stand out).
- You should always add a title to your conversations be it a "New conversation" or an "Announcement" so that it is searchable by other Team members.
- Make use of the acknowledgment icons for conversations rather than having to reply to each conversation concerning you. Otherwise, you'll have lots of replies (you’ll need to Click the "See more" link to expand to read through).
- It is a good idea to set "Channel notifications" for each channel that you are a member of where you can prioritise the important ones. You can turn off notifications for a whole channel.
Meetings - TEAMS: "Meet now", "Schedule a meeting" & Outlook: "New Teams Meeting"
- You can create a meeting for a Team or a Channel respectively.
- You create a meeting for the whole Team using the "New Teams Meeting" button in the Calendar tab in Outlook.
- There are three main ways to create a meeting in the TEAMS app. That being; In a Channel using the "Meet Now" button, the "Schedule a meeting" (join?minutes before and give the meeting a title) button, and the "Meet Now" after you have posted a Conversation or an Announcement. Another way is to use the Calendar tab (which allows you to "Meet now", "Schedule meeting", "Webinar" and "Live event") in TEAMS.
- You cannot create a meeting specifically for a Channel in Outlook, rather you create a "New Teams Meeting" in Outlook and add the link to the channel as a hyperlink in the body of the meeting.
Read more on TEAMS in my book "Microsoft TEAMS for Everyday Users" @ https://bookboon.com/en/microsoft-teams-for-everyday-users-ebook.
Many thanks, Larry Saytee
