Tips for Using Microsoft Teams Sites

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When to Create a Team

• Create a Team when an effort requires a unique group of members to collaborate. If you already have a Team with those members, use a channel. A channel is a section of a Team on a focused topic.

Create Channels to Focus Discussions

• Each team should craft channels based on their work, priorities and style.
• Learn how to add a channel in Teams.
• When adding a new channel, select the "Automatically show this channel in everyone’s channel list" option to ensure Team members see the new channel.

Use 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 on-boarding and other high-level information that a new team member would find useful.
• Use it for announcements.
• 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.

Consider Setting Up Moderation in Your Channels

• Team owners can turn on moderation for a channel to control who can start new posts and reply to posts in that channel.
• When you set up moderation, you can choose one or more team members to be moderators.

 

From a Team...

1. Select the Team's three-dots icon to reveal a drop-down menu. Show or Hide will appear in the menu.
   
   
2. When you select Show/Hide, the Team becomes either visible or hidden in your Teams list.
   
   

Channel notifications can change how you receive direct notifications whenever there's new channel activity. To ensure you receive notifications from a channel...

1. On a Team channel, select the three-dots icon to reveal a drop-down menu.
2. From the menu, choose Channel notifications.
   
   
   
   
3. The Channel Notifications window appears. Change "All new posts" to Banner and Feed.
4. Select the Include all replies checkbox.
5. Click or tap Save.
   
   
   
   

Make sure you use the reply at the bottom left of a conversation instead of starting a new conversation using the big box at the bottom of the screen.

If you start too many conversations, it gets confusing because they will be reordered by most recent.

Keep replying to keep all your thoughts on a subject grouped together.

 

Just adding a response to a Teams conversation may not be enough. While some Teams members choose to be to notified on all channel activity, you cannot assume all have done so.

To call someone's attention in a channel conversation or a chat, @mention them. Type @ before their name and then select them from the menu that appears.

They receive a notification, which they can click to go directly into the point in the conversation where they were mentioned.

To get the attention of an entire team, try one of these:

• Type @team to message everyone on that team.
• Type @channel to notify everyone who has favorited that channel.
• Tag members and @mention the tags.

 

Subject lines keep your conversations organized improving readability. Conversations are in chronological order.

When you select new conversation, click or tap the Format icon (the Letter A with a pen) to add subject lines, which are bold, larger-font text above your first comment in a new conversation.

 

For many Teams users, using the Like button has become an equivalent for "got it," "sounds good" and "okay." It's for acknowledgement, not sentiment.

• Think about an informational email sent to a team of, say 20 people. Do you reply with a "sounds good" email message? Do you reply all with that response, so everyone else knows you've seen the message?
  
  
• When you "like" a message in Teams, everyone on the Teams site can see that you've done so, and the author gets a notification. And liking as acknowledgement in Teams supplants all of those "sounds good" email replies.