Channels in MS Teams
Channels are a big part of Teams and assist with building conversation and collaboration around a topic, such as projects or core team functions like research, admin, finance etc
Every team will have two default channels added: An Urgent channel (named 1-Urgent) for priority discussion items and a General channel (2-General) to discuss general topics related to the team's purpose. You will also have the ability to create new channels in your team. (see creating channels instruction)
When creating new channels, we suggest adding an alpha-numeric naming convention (e.g. 5-Project_XX) to give you channels a more defined structure / hierarchy
Tabs
The purpose of tabs is to put frequently accessed information front and centre within Teams for easy access by all team members.
Tabs are best used in a Teams channel to provide structure to collaboration centring around Office 365 tools. Many of these tools will already be familiar to you, for example Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. This allows tabs to fulfil a variety of uses or functions, depending on your needs.
To help you get started, we'd suggest setting up the following tabs for your channels
- Files (key documents - this should be added by default)
- Planning (using MS Planner)
- Decisions_Actions (using OneNote)
- Data_Metrics (using Excel)
Files
This is essentially a shared document library ,which displays all your Team's files, (that will be stored in your Sharepoint team site).
Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and PDF files must be uploaded to the Files tab before they can be converted to other tabs. Any existing uploaded file can be converted to a tab with a single click
Once a file is added, you can immediately start working on it with your team members. So if add a document to a tab, this will be visible to all team members who can edit, review, annotate the document.
Planning
Microsoft Planner is a to-do app that comes with Office 365. It’s used for personal and teamwork planning, with a simple card-based interface that’s similar to Trello.
Decisions_Actions
This tab should be setup to use OneNote, which is a note taking application.
Team members can create notes that can include text, tables, pictures, and drawings. Unlike a word processor, OneNote features a virtually unbounded document window, in which users can click anywhere with the notes page to create a new text box at that location. OneNote saves data automatically as the user makes edits to their file.
Excel
Websites