Microsoft Teams is an online communication and team collaboration tool that’s part of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. While it’s mostly used for video conferencing by remote teams, that’s not the only thing it can do. Teams can help you: Create dedicated channels for specific tasks or teams. In Windows, click Start Microsoft Teams. On Mac, go to the Applications folder and click Microsoft Teams. On mobile, tap the Teams icon. Then sign in with your Office 365 username and password. (If you’re using Teams free, sign in with that username and password.) Pick a team and channel.
Note
Review the following information to understand chat, teams, channels, & apps in Teams. Then, go to Chat, teams, channels, & apps in Teams to walk through a list of decisions important to your Teams rollout.
Let’s get started by thinking about how Microsoft Teams allows individual teams to self-organize and collaborate across business scenarios:
Teams are a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization.
- Teams can be created to be private to only invited users.
- Teams can also be created to be public and open and anyone within the organization can join (up to 10,000 members).
A team is designed to bring together a group of people who work closely to get things done. Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations). Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.
Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—-whatever works for your team! Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint. To learn more, read How SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business interact with Teams.
- Channels are places where conversations happen and where the work actually gets done. Channels can be open to all team members or, if you need a more select audience, they can be private. Standard channels are for conversations that everyone in a team can participate in and private channels limit communication to a subset of people in a team.
- Channels are most valuable when extended with apps that include tabs, connectors, and bots that increase their value to the members of the team. To learn more, see Apps, bots, & connectors in Teams.
For help using teams and channels, check out Teams and channels.
View this short video to learn more about best practices for creating teams and channels.
Membership, roles, and settings
Team membership
When Microsoft Teams is activated for your entire organization, designated team owners can invite any employee they work with to join their team. Microsoft Teams makes it easy for team owners to add people in the organization based on their name. Depending on your organization's settings guests who are team members but outside of your organization can also be added to your teams. See Guest Access in Microsoft Teams for more information.
Team owners can also create a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group. Any changes made to the group will be synced with Microsoft Teams automatically. Creating a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group not only simplifies the process of inviting and managing members, but also syncs group files inside of Microsoft Teams.
Team roles
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There are two main roles in Microsoft Teams:
- Team owner - The person who creates the team. Team owners can make any member of their team a co-owner when they invite them to the team or at any point after they’ve joined the team. Having multiple team owners lets you share the responsibilities of managing settings and membership, including invitations.
- Team members - The people who the owners invite to join their team.
In addition, if moderation is set up, team owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel. Moderators can start new posts in the channel and control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages. Team owners can assign moderators within a channel. (Team owners have moderator capabilities by default.) Moderators within a channel can add or remove other moderators within that channel. For more information, see Set up and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams.
Team settings
Team owners can manage team-wide settings directly in Microsoft Teams. Settings include the ability to add a team picture, set permissions across team members for creating standard and private channels, adding tabs and connectors, @mentioning the entire team or channel, and the usage of GIFs, stickers, and memes.
Take three minutes to check out this go-to-guide video for team owners:
If you are a Microsoft Teams administrator in Microsoft 365 or Office 365, you have access to system-wide settings in the Microsoft Teams admin center. These settings can impact the options and defaults team owners see under team settings. For example, you can enable a default channel, “General”, for team-wide announcements, discussions, and resources, which will appear across all teams.
By default, all users have permissions to create a team within Microsoft Teams (to modify this, see Assign roles and permissions in Teams. Users of an existing Microsoft 365 group can also enhance their permissions with Teams functionality.
One key early planning activity to engage users with Microsoft Teams is to help people think and understand how Teams can enhance collaboration in their day to day lives. Talk with people and help them select business scenarios where they are currently collaborating in fragmented ways. Bring them together in a channel with the relevant tabs that will help them get their work done. One of the most powerful use cases of Teams is any cross-organizational process.
Example Teams
Below are a few functional examples of how different types of users may approach setting up their teams, channels, and apps (tabs/connectors/bots). This may be useful to help kick off a conversation about Microsoft Teams with your user community. As you think about how to implement Microsoft Teams in your organization, remember that you can provide guidance on how to structure their teams; however, users have control of how they can self-organize. These are just examples to help get teams to start thinking through the possibilities.
Microsoft Teams is great for breaking down organizational silos and promoting cross-functional teams, so encourage your users to think about functional teams rather than organizational boundaries.
| Types of Teams | Potential Channels | Apps (Tabs /Connectors /Bots ) |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Annual Sales Meeting Quarterly Business Review Monthly Sales Pipeline Review Sales Playbook | Power BI Trello CRM Summarize Bot |
| Public Relations | Press Releases News and Updates Fact Checking | RSS Feed |
| Event Planning | Marketing Logistics and Scheduling Venue Budget | Twitter Planner |
| Marketing/Go to Market | Market Research Messaging Pillars Communications Plan Marketing Bill of Materials | YouTube Microsoft Stream MailChimp |
| Technical Operations | Incident Management Sprint Planning Work Items Infrastructure and Operations | Team Services Jira AzureBot |
| Product Team | Strategy Marketing Sales Operations Insights Services & Support | Power BI Team Services |
| Finance | Current Fiscal FY Planning Forecasting Accounts Receivable Accounts Payable | Power BI Google Analytics |
| Logistics | Warehouse Operations Vehicle Maintenance Driver Rosters | Weather Service Travel / Road Disruptions Planner Tubot UPS Bot |
| HR | Talent Management Recruiting Performance Review Planning Morale | HR Tools External Job Posting Sites Growbot |
| Cross-organizational Virtual Team | Strategy Workforce Development Compete & Research | Power BI Microsoft Stream |
It's possible to create Teams that align with the organizational structure. This is best used for leaders who want to drive morale, have team-specific reviews, clarify employee onboarding processes, discuss workforce plans, and increase visibility across a diverse workforce.
Org-wide teams
If your organization has no more than 5,000 users, you can create an org-wide team. Org-wide teams provide an automatic way for everyone in an organization to be a part of a single team for collaboration. For more information, including best practices for creating and managing an org-wide team, see Create an org-wide team in Microsoft Teams.
-->| Admin training Use these tutorials, videos, and other training resources to learn about Teams and drive usage in your org. |
| Teams live training Microsoft-hosted free, live, online training classes designed to get you up and running with Teams. Join us to see Teams in action, get your questions answered, and interact with our live instructors. |
| Teams online training Use these self-paced training resources to help users in your get the most out of Teams. |
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