The backbone of Microsoft Teams is, of course, the various teams that are created within the platform for collaboration and communication.  These teams represent a collection of people working towards a common goal or objective.  Sometimes they are simply mirror an existing functional area or department in your company's org chart.  There are a number of different ways teams can come to be and in this document we will talk about some best practice considerations for not only when a team within MS Teams should be created but how to use MS Teams to improve communication and collaboration without creating too many teams and cluttering everyone's sidebars.

Team Membership.

There are three types of participants in a team.

  • Owners
    Team owners manage certain settings for the team. They add and remove members, add guests, change team settings, and handle administrative tasks. There can be multiple owners in a team.
  • Members
    Members are the people in the team. They talk with other team members in conversations. They can view and usually upload and change files. They also do the usual sorts of collaboration that the team owners have permitted.
  • Guests
    Guests are people from outside of your organization that a team owner invites, such as partners or consultants to join the team. Guests have fewer capabilities than team members or team owners, but there's still a lot they can do.

Channels and Chats.teams and channels.png

Within any team you can also create channels. Channels allow team members to focus communications and collaborative activities around a specific topic. Every team, by default, has a General channel. The general advice is create less teams, create more channels.

There are two types of channels: Standard and Private.

  • A standard channel is visible to everyone on the Team.  It inherits its participant list from the team.
  • A private channel will prompt its creator to add who the participants should be from within the team.

The General channel

  • Use it to share an overview of what the team wants to achieve such as a project charter or who's who in the team.
  • Use it for new team member onboarding and other high-level information that a new team member would find useful.
  • For new or single purpose teams, it may be the only channel at the beginning as you decide how Teams can best support your goals.

Chats are typically meant to be one-to-one or one-to-few. Think of them as operational conversations rather than the broad discussion and solution repository that a channel can be.

  • Each message notifies users so use it when you need immediate response from someone.
  • Chat can easily replace a phone call or a video chat for simple queries
  • Day to day discussions, information that could be deleted or forgotten, could go to a chat conversation. The entire team DOESNT need to know about these operational chats
  • A document shared in a conversation goes to the onedrive of the person sharing the document.  Newcomers to the conversation will not access existing documents shared previously. It is useful to quickly co-create a document and once finalized, drop it to a Team or a SharePoint site.