2 – Using Channels in Teams

Video Transcript #

This session on using channels within Teams is from part one of our series, “Teams Basics and Beyond.”

The best way to think of Teams to think in terms of channels – the conversations you have with other people who are focused on the same things you’re supposed to be focused on.

Those teammates might include your boss, people who report to you, staff that’s been assigned to a particular project even if they come from other departments or divisions. Even the members of the company’s softball team.

Channels can be devoted to customers, for particular projects or locations within those customers, those are called sub channels and it’s a good idea to use them, but it’s an even better idea not to get carried away with them because we’re not trying to duplicate your entire corporate file structure inside of Teams.

Teams is supposed to be fast.

It’s supposed to enable the people who need to work together to work together quickly and efficiently.

I’m going to hand it off to Wes Boggs, who’s our vice president of technology, he’s gonna walk you through how to use channels, how to set them up, how to make them work.

Hello my name is Wes Boggs from I.T. Solutions of South Florida. I’m here today to talk to you about some of the basics of Teams and channels in the Microsoft Teams application.

The first thing I want to discuss is what is a team?

What is a Team? #

So a team is a group of individuals, employees, could be external people as well, that you’ve grouped together that need to communicate and collaborate in order to accomplish specific goals.

In some cases, you may have a team that has every employee in your company like this one for Contoso.

Sometimes they’re organized by job function or by department so you’ll see here we have a sales team, a sales and marketing team, a retail team.

Sometimes they’re organized by a project or a deliverable or a client or specific task that has people from multiple divisions are multiple departments that are working together.

So here you’ll see like our market project team or a digital initiative for public relations team.

Inside of each team when you first make the team it’s going to make a general channel the general channel is the default channel for the team.

It has everyone who’s a member of the team in it and when you first join the team you’ll be added to that channel.

What are Channels? #

You can then add channels underneath the general channel to have additional organization of what’s going on with the team.

So for instance under the marketing project team, they created a channel for design specifically. There’s a channel here for the digital assets that are going to be used on the website. There’s a channel to focus communications on the go to market plan and there’s a channel on research and development.

If we look at the sales team, we’ll notice that underneath the general team, we have a sales for the east coast of the United States and a sales for the west coast of the United States.

Here in retail we looks like we’ve got in North Carolina area code 460 has been broken out of the specific channel underneath the retail team.

As you can see there’s many different strategies that you can use to organize your teams and your channels and this can be fully customized to meet your business needs.

How to Pin Channels #

So the next thing we want to talk about is pinning channels. So you’ll notice here that I have a couple of channels pinned at the top. You can pin up to 15 channels to the top of the list of in the teams area of the application.

If I want to add a channel to the pinned the area I go and click the three little ellipses to the right of the channel. I choose pin from the menu.

How to Remove Pinned Channels #

If I want to remove a pinned object. I can do the exact same thing and go and click on the three ellipses on a pinned channel and I can unpin that channel.

How to Modify Channel Notification Settings #

Additionally, I have options to turn notifications off and on for individual channels.

As you can see as the number of channels grows the opportunity for you to get interrupted by things that you might not want to be interrupted by grows.

So at the channel level, you can click on the three ellipses, you can go to channel notifications and you can choose if you want to be notified all activity in that channel, or if you prefer to have notifications turned off.

How to Make a New Channel #

So now let’s go through and make a new channel.

So for instance Contoso which is our team that has everybody, we’ve got an event calendar and out of office calendar, but I’m actually going to make a specific channel for the upcoming company picnic.

So at the team level. I’m going to click the ellipses.

I’m going to choose to add a channel. From the pop-up. I’m going to type, “Company Picnic”. And in the description I’m going to type, “Let’s keep all of our conversations regarding the upcoming company picnic in this channel so nobody misses them.”

I have the option here to have the channel that I’m creating accessible to everyone on the team.

If I wanted to I could also make this channel private and choose a subset of the people on the team, that would have access to it.

And then I can choose to automatically show the channel and on everyone’s list, so I’m going to go ahead and check that box and I’m going to click on “Add.”

So those are some of the basic functions in Teams and channels and if you have any further questions, be sure to reach out to us and we’d be more than happy to assist.