MS Teams

Share information using channels, located inside a team

What’s the difference between Teams & Channels? 

• Team: a collection of people who gather around a common goal (e.g., department, faculty…).
• Channels: the collaborative sections within a team where people can chat, share files and collaborate about specific topics, projects, disciplines – whatever makes sense based on the needs of your team. (e.g., projects, initiatives…).

Join a team 

• Ask the team owner to add you as a member of the team 
• Ask a colleague to submit a request to the team owner and once approved, you will be part of the team 
• Use a link or code to join a team (code must be sent by Team owner) 

Create a team 

To create a new team, contact the Service Desk with: 

• Team name as you'd like it to appear (max. 32 characters)
• Team owner(s) who can control the team, channels, and members 
• Email addresses of members to be added to the team 

Note: The function to autonomously create a team is disabled. Contact the Service Desk for assistance. 

Create a channel 

Once you are part of a team, a general channel is automatically created so you can start working on it. You can also add a channel (if you want a specific one).  

Here’s how:  

Private channels

Private channels create focused spaces for collaboration within your teams. Only the users on the team who are owners or members of the private channel can access the channel. Each team can have a maximum of 30 private channels and each private channel can have a maximum of 250 members. 

Add members to a team 

Once your team and channels are defined, don’t forget to add members to your team.  

You can now add external guests to your team to collaborate with people outside of our organization.

-----

• ideal for projects or a department 
• message you want to share with a group of people that you deal with regularly 
• files that you want available to a group of people 
• conversations that are kept permanently so that future members joining the group will be able to go back and read.   

Send texts to a person or a few people

• send quick questions to colleagues
• find out if they are available or have another status set in Teams
• easily share a link that will pop up on their screen
• share your screen to be more productive when troubleshooting
• some groups use it to share their priorities for the day with each other
• for real-time conversations or asynchronous communications, the text will stay there until the person sees it 

Have online & real-time meetings with a person or a group

Schedule and attend a meeting (audio & visual or just audio)

• invite people to join your meeting
• blur your background or add background effect (for more fun) in a video meeting
• start a chat inside your meeting; use @mentions to get someone's attention
• make presentations virtually by sharing your screen during your meeting

Lets participants of Teams meetings draw, sketch, and write together on a shared digital canvas. Use whiteboard in Microsoft Teams. 

• Use it as you would if you were in a conference room, jotting things on a whiteboard. 
• Share it with other meeting attendees by email or copying and pasting the link.  
• Save it easily at the end of your meeting without worrying about losing all that information! 

 

There’s a lot you can do remotely! Check out Teams training links, quick reference sheets, troubleshooting guides, and resources on our website.