Microsoft Teams is the most popular collaboration tool to quickly pull together a Virtual Team of people inside & outside your organization, chat with each other, have conversations in specific user groups, securely can share documents, have meetings and calls to collaborate from wherever users are and a lot more.
In addition, MS Teams also simplifies your access to office 365 services, and can let you access thirty-party apps on its tabs to meet all your collaboration and communication needs.
A team is a collection of people who gather around a common goal through a virtual center where they can communicate or collaborate. Channels are the collaboration spaces within a team where actual work gets done.
Get started with Microsoft Teams Setup
If you are an admin, you can create teams and manage teams and the channels in the team’s client, or through Teams admin center. you can create teams as Public or Private, as well as create an organization-wide team. If anyone is using teams in your organization, they can join a public team.
For Private teams, team owners manage team membership & for an org-wide team, everyone in your organization is automatically added. Before explaining about what Team & the Channel is, but who can create a Team & who can access Channel or Team, you need to know Team Roles first.
Team Roles:
Team Owner:
The person who creates the team. Team owners can make anyone member of their team as a co-owner when they add them to the team.
Team Member:
Team owners invite their team members to join.
Guest Access:
Team owners can grant permission to join their team to access.
How to create a team and a channel with the step wise.
- On the left navigation, click Teams and then click Join or create a team
- Click Create a new team
Once you have created a team, invite people to join it. You can add individual users. - Add a member into Teams
Find the team that you created, Click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Add Members. - Add an Owner into Teams
Find the team that you created, Click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Manage team. Then go to Members tab & Click on Add Member. Find the people you want to add as team owner - Next Under Role, Click on Owner.
Create a Channel in a Team:
Find that already that you created a team, Click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Add Channel. And, there is another way to add a channel, Click on Manage team. Then go to the Channels tab & Click on Add Channel.
Types of Channels & differences:
Standard / Public Channel:
All the members of a Team can create channels. A public channel is open for all the members in the Team & anything posted is searchable by others.
Example: Large companies we can use Public channels.
Steps for How we add a Public channel into Teams:
Find the Team name, Click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Add Channel.
There is another way to add a channel:
Click on Manage Team. Then, go to Channels tab & Click on Add Channel.
Private Channel:
In a Private channel, it is not open to all members. In this, you must be invited to join one to view it within a team. When you create a Private channel, you will have a separate Site collection created along with it. In this team owner or team member can create a private channel and add the members to channel.
Note: when a member creates a private channel in your team, even though you have an admin permission you cannot access the channel.
Example: Small companies can use Private channels.
Steps for How we add a Private channel into Teams:
- Find the team that you created, Click on Ellipse ˙˙˙ > Add Channel.
- Enter the Name & Description for your channel.
- Under Privacy, select the down arrow on the right side, and then select Private – Accessible only to a specific group of people within the team.
- Click on Add. It creates a private channel to the team.
- Add members to a channel & click on Add.
As we know the Team member & Team owner play roles in Teams and one more role in Guest Access.
Before coming to Guest Access, you need to know about external sharing. Internally, we can share documents, files, & folders. But if you want to communicate with people outside your organization & communicate through meetings or conversations with a shared calendar
In this case guest access, you can invite someone outside the organization. They can access your teams and they can join a group conversation with the other team members.
- Create a channel.
- You can Participate in a private chat.
- Channel conversations.
Below features are not available for Guest access in Teams
- Calendar, Scheduled meetings or Meeting Details
- Create a team.
- Upload files to a person – to – Person chat.
In Teams you can add External users to an O365 group as a guest, guest permissions in O365 group slightly differ and you need to grant permission or access to outside of Teams.
Before adding guest access, you first need to have enabled as an org-wide setting in Teams.
By default, it is turned off.
Conclusion:
Using Teams, you can schedule a meeting, and it will be synchronized with your outlook calendar.
Microsoft Teams has an option of adding external apps which makes work easier as we can access those apps inside teams. This will save lots of time as we do not need to open and close all the Apps, instead access all integrated apps inside Teams itself.
All information such as conversations, documents, and status will be stored on a SharePoint site where we can restrict others from getting particular information’s.
How to add Guest member before adding we need turn on Guest access in the office 365 admin portal?
We need to understand step by step how to add Guest Member. We will discuss that in our next blog. Stay tuned…
