This article will walk through some great info about using Microsoft Teams. Feel free to explore by clicking on the following buttons:
General
Best Practices
- Make your out-of-office response Teams friendly. Your calendar status and out of office responses in Outlook will be pulled into Teams and visible to those you collaborate with.
- Teams is a great collaboration tool for quick communication.
- Consult the Help button in the bottom left corner of the Teams desktop app to discover helpful tips and tricks.
- Each team can have a maximum of 30 private channels and each private channel can have a maximum of 250 members. The 30 private channel limit is in addition to the 200 standard channel limit per team.
Additional Resources
Video Meetings
Unlike Vidyo, Teams doesn't have personal rooms to search and join video calls. If you're needing to book a conference room, it's a best practice to schedule the conference room when you're creating the meeting invite. To learn more about scheduling meetings in Teams, follow the article here.
Best Practices for Scheduling a Video Call
- When you're joining or creating a meeting, it's always better to schedule the meeting, if possible. For smaller 1-on-1 meetings, you can join a video call via the 'Chat' option in Teams.
- In larger meetings, it's best to keep your microphone muted while you're not speaking. This will help with feedback and noise.
- Whenever possible, wear headphones to get better sound quality and microphone quality.
- You can join a video meeting from either a browser or the Teams application. To learn more, click here.
Team Owners
Team owners have....let say....superpowers. They are the ones that can Create Channels and manage the team settings and its members.
Some things you can do in your team
- Give your team an image!
You can do this by clicking the (…) next to the Team name and choosing “Manage Team”, then clicking the little pencil in the Teams Image. From there you can upload a picture for it.
- Manage your Team Settings
You can do this by clicking the (…) next to the Team, and choosing “Manage Team”, then going to Settings.
- Some settings you may want to adjust:
- Channel Creation can be restricted to just Owners only.
- Guests can also be restricted to not create or delete channels.
- Disable @team or @channel notifications.
- Disable Giphy or restrict content to “G-rated” only.
- Disable ability to members to add/remove apps.
- You can View Team Analytics to gauge engagement in the tool. (Manage Team→ Analytics).
Teams
Teams are groups of people that connect for work, projects, or common interests.
All Teams channel activity you have subscribed to, or that was sent to you, gets rolled up in the “Activity” tab.
Best Practices
- Use Team channels for important announcements or information applicable to the team
- Respond to posts as a threaded response:
Don’t mix up Start a new conversation when you intend to Reply to a conversation. These are different boxes and it’s difficult to recover if you start a new conversation when you meant to reply to one.
3. @mention people to be sure they are notified of your post or response
4. Make use of the “Activity” section to manage your responses
5. Get the app!
Notifications
- Want to get notified of every new post in a channel? Click the (…) next to the channel and select “Channel Notifications” to manage your settings.
- Did you get tagged in a thread but it is no longer applicable to you? You can unsubscribe from individual posts by clicking the (…) next to the post and selecting “Turn Off Notifications”
- Do you want to follow a thread without having to post in it? Click the (…) next to the post and click “Turn On Notifications”
Volunteers and Contractors
- You can add volunteers or contractors to your team or chat.
- Please note that when you add a guest to your team, they will be able to see all public channels.
- You can add the guest to private channels as well.
Channels
Channels are comparable to email conversations, with the ability to organize responses in threads.
- Public Team Channels are accessible to everyone on the team and are grouped according to goal or subject to keep collaboration organized.
- Private Team Channels are accessible only to those members of the group - new members must be invited by a current member.
- To learn more about Channels, check out THESE ARTICLES.
Best Practices
- Channel messages do not notify users by default, they only produce “unread” indicators.
Setup your notifications with THIS ARTICLE.
Chats
Chats are comparable to text messages, with default alerts for every message. Chats are great for 1:1 conversations or group communication
Best Practices
- Rename Group Chats to fit the purpose or members of the group.
- Add new members and be sure to give them access to all, some, or none of the message history as appropriate.
- You can add and remove group members without starting a new group.