5 Common Microsoft Teams Questions Answered

5 Common Microsoft Teams questions answered

In our last article on Microsoft Teams, we discussed some of the tips and tricks that help you get more from the video conferencing and collaboration tool. However, there are some very commonly asked questions that we receive about setting people up to use Teams which we thought would be ideal to share here. These questions will help you get closer to understanding how Microsoft Teams will work best for your business and how to leverage it to work more efficiently for your team.

How to create your own team on Microsoft Teams

Create your own team and you can collaborate easily within a single hub of activity. Many businesses create these for their different departments or organisation-wide discussions where several members need to easily work together and collaborate on ideas, documents and in meetings. Building your own team or channel is easy:

1. Select Teams in the left rail of icons within Microsoft Teams
2. Click Join or create a team at the bottom of the screen – if the option doesn’t exist you’ll need your system administrator to approve you.
3. You can either clone a team that already exists, or create one from scratch
4. Then you need to choose whether it’s a public team (anyone can join), or a private team (permission-based)
5. Finally, enter a team name and description and create your team
6. You’re now ready to add members to your team

How to add people to your Teams

Your ‘Team’ are members of your organisation within Microsoft Teams itself. Adding a colleague or member allows them to be a part of your collaboration space and to interact with it. Firstly, you will need to be the ‘owner’ of your channel to have permission to add members to your Teams space. As a team owner, you can add new members and guests, change members into owners, manage channels and settings, and archive a team that’s no longer in use.

If you are not the owner, you will need to speak to your administrator to change your permissions.

1. As a team owner, go to your Teams list.
2. Find ‘more options’ by clicking on the three dots (…), and select Add member.
3. Search the name or email address of the members you would like to add and click Add.
4. Continue doing this until you have added all the members to the Team.

How to set permissions to a team

If you would like to make someone an owner or view who’s an owner of an existing team, go to the team name and click More options (…) > Manage team.

The Role column tells you if someone is a team member or owner. To make someone an owner, click Member and then select Owner.

How to add channels into Microsoft Teams

We’ve learnt how to set up a team in Microsoft Teams, but what about a channel. Teams are made up of channels, which are the conversations you have with your teammates. Each channel is dedicated to a specific topic, department, or project which helps keep track of files and conversations.

You are able to set up a standard channel, where anyone can have access to your conversations within the organisation or set up a private channel which is secure to only the members within that particular channel.

Create a channel

1. Go to the team you want to create the private channel for and choose More options(…) > Add channel.
2. Enter a name and description for your channel.
3. Under Privacy, select the down arrow on the right, and then select either:
   • Standard – Accessible to everyone on the team
   • Private – Accessible only to a specific group of people within the team.
4. Select Add. This adds a channel to the team.

As a private channel owner, you can add or remove members, and edit private channel settings. Each person that you add must first be a member of the team.

How to add a guest to a team to enable guest access in Microsoft Teams

You may find that you need to collaborate with people from outside your organisation on a number of projects and having all your conversations and documents housed within one place makes life so much easier.

Once you’re connected, you can chat, meet, video call and share documents easily and efficiently in Microsoft Teams.

1. Ensure that you are set as the team owner
2. Navigate to the team where you want to give guest access.
3. Select the Team, click on More option (…) and then select Add member.
4. Enter the guest’s email address and Add.

With just a few tips, Microsoft Teams becomes the most efficient conferencing and collaboration tool you can use online. Perfect for this current lockdown lifestyle – but also ideal for ongoing remote working.  What better time to future-proof your business than with a great Microsoft Teams implementation? Get in touch today if you’d like to learn more – let’s talk Teams.