Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a great collaboration tool. To get full benefit from Teams, there are certain tips and tricks that need to be learned.

Format messages

Make messages stand out to your recipients, by default a new conversation just provides a text box, but you can get the complete formatting option by clicking formatting option. Whenever you open a new conversation, it is good practice to open with proper subject and detailed message.

If you are sharing any code, use the Code Snippet option so that you can get benefit of syntax highlights.

• ? Add a subject line / title
• ?? Change font color / style. Ensuring the proper formatting and highlighting helps to land the message clear.
• Mark with importance “!”
• ? Bold, Highlight, Heading - Make use of Heading 1, 2 etc., if the message is longer.
• ? Add bullets
• “ ” Quotes
• ``` Insert code
• # Insert Code?block with language formatting

Conversations

?? Thread: It is good to keep long threads for each topic area instead of short messages. In Team, you can have multiple Channels, within a Channel, you can manage Threads. People new to Teams use it as chat application, but that is not Teams is far. Organizing the conversations in proper Thread helps to use Teams effectively. In order to have proper Threads, it is important to start a conversation with proper Title. A new conversation started only when there was no similar topic already existed.

Avoid Group chats. The idea is to have all project related discussions in one Teams channel, the related parties are tagged. People do not get tagged may know the discussion is happening, but can ignore, it is same as in a physical office environment, two of your colleges are talking, you may overhear that. So, it is ok to have chat thread which involves only subset of the team.

• Make a smart choice on New Conversation vs Reply to existing conversation.
• You can Reply for a specific Message.
• Take advantage of Edit Message

@ Use Mentions wisely: There are many ways you can use @ mentions in Teams. It is not just limited to people's names.

• Person Name – any Team member @mentioned will receive a notification
• Channel Name – any Team member following the channel will receive a notification
• Team Name – every Team member will receive a notification
• Create Tags: In a Team, you can create Tags to represent a group of people. For example, you can have a Tag DevEngineers covering all the Dev engineers. When you post the message, you can use @DevEngineers to generate a notification to all Dev Engineers.

???Organize meetings in the channel: When a meeting schedule in a Teams channel, all meeting conversation stays in the channel and all channel members could join the meeting.

Expression

• ?? Use the thumbs–up button for acknowledgement or agreement, It’s not just a Like button!
• Personalize memes, Gifs, Emojis (Laugh, Sad, Wink, cryingwithlaughter, Surprised, Penguin, Rofl, Devil, Wonder, Facepalm, Waiting)
• Take advantage of Windows Emoji Keyboard. The shortcut is Win + ;

Focus:

Over time, there could be more Teams and Channels. If you are not setting up the notification setting properly, it will be overwhelming.

• ?? Reorder your Teams by dragging and dropping it.
• ?? Show only most used channels, Hide rest!
• ?? Set your Notification preference for each channel, using Channels Notification.
• ?? Pin Chats / Channels for quick access.
• ?? Save Chats for future, Mark it as Read / Unread
• ???Activity: Use to check the recent happenings.

Sharing

You can provide deep link to various sections of Teams.

• Teams link
• Channel link
• Teams channel email
• Message link
• Share to Outlook
• Share to Teams
• Tabs & Links

Tips & Ticks

• You can search in particular Channel, File, People, Message
• Use mouse wheel to zoom in / zoom out
• For multiple sessions use the web version and desktop parallelly.
• Use command bar for quick access
• In the message window you can use mark-downs for quick formatting.
• Take advantage of multi window.

Microsoft Teams is an amazing app for collaboration, any tool or app works best if we use them well. Hope these quick tips helps to get best out of Teams.