Now that the new year is well underway and you and your colleagues are finding yourselves embarking upon new projects, you may be tempted to create a series of new Teams to help you organize your content. But before you click “Create” on those new Teams, consider if you may be better served creating a channel within an existing Team.

About Your Team Groups

Open Teams on your desktop and look for an app in the app bar similarly called Teams. These “Teams in Teams” are a workspace tool for you and your colleagues, connecting anyone who is a member or owner together in a Microsoft 365 group. These Teams are a great space for you and your coworkers to access shared content and collaborate using a variety of tools.

By the way, to avoid confusion, I am going to refer to these as Team groups here to distinguish them from the broader Teams application.

 

Using Team Groups for Work Projects

Team groups are a natural go-to tool for work projects, and for good reason. They reduce the never-ending back and forth of emails and the inevitable duplicate files this creates, they make sharing simpler, and they can even incorporate some additional apps, like Microsoft Lists and Microsoft Forms, to help you stay organized.

“So,” you think to yourself, “my colleagues and I are about to embark upon a spring project, I think I will create a new team to keep us organized.” Great thinking! But before you do, I have one consideration for you…

Team Channels

Channels are created within a Team Group to help you further organize content intended for the same Team Group membership. Within your Team group, look on the lefthand menu for the existing channels in your current Team.

Each Team group comes with at least one channel, called General.

Channels allow you an additional level of organization within your Team. You will notice, as you navigate between channels, they each have unique posts, files, and tab structures. So, they can be customized to be highly unique from one another.

New Channel vs. New Team

Okay, back to your situation, you are embarking on a spring project, do you make a new Team or a new Channel within an existing Team?

Who is involved in the project?

Here is my advice: think about who is involved in this project. Are the collaborators all people who are already members of an existing Team with you? If so, the organization strategy for this project might be better served with a channel within an existing Team.

Think about your Team group as your virtual office space. You would probably not look for new physical office space for each new project with the same colleagues… You would likely use the same storage spaces and meet in the same conference rooms to handle a variety of projects. The same concept applies for your virtual office spaces, like Teams groups.

At their heart, Team groups are intended to identify a specific group of people who regularly work together, by nature of their position or across divisions in collaborative projects. So, these groups are all about the people who should have access to the content, not the content itself. The channels, on the other hand, are all about the content.

Side note

Are there exceptions? Of course! Is this a rule? Do you have to create channels instead of a new Team? No way! But I did want to remind you about channels, because there is a tendency to create a new Team group when using an existing Team might simplify things and keep your ever-expanding Team list a little more manageable.

Creating a Channel

Creating a channel is easy, and it is something we do together in both Teams Essentials and Teams Advanced training.

1. Open your Team group and look for the more (…) menu next to your Team group name.

2. Select Add Channel.

3. You have a variety of customization options, and I will leave most of those to the full trainings, but one that may interest you is the ability to create a Private channel. A private channel is only viewable by certain specified members of your Team.

Upcoming Training Opportunities

If this has inspired you to learn more about Team Channels, you might be interested in attending Teams Essentials and Teams Advanced training.

Visit myTraining for available times and to sign up for a session. Also, I mentioned Microsoft Lists as a fantastic Teams tool: look for Microsoft Lists Essentials if you are interested in learning more (this one is super cool, and a lot of people don’t know about it).

Microsoft Cloud Power User Digital Credential

Coincidentally, all three of those trainings will get you halfway to WSU’s Microsoft Cloud Power User Digital Credential . Just saying…