Collaboration is an important piece to having a successful team, allowing you to have a successful workplace. While being able to go over and talk to your colleague is always a great way to do it, sometimes, you either want to have something in writing, you want to be able to share a file with them, or you cannot communicate with them face to face. This is where Teams comes in!
We have discussed numerous different methods that we can use teams, managing your meetings with it, adding external users as guests, and even how to create custom backgrounds. Today, we are going to look at creating ourselves a brand new Team, and Teams are created with Microsoft Groups.
Note: You will require permissions to create a team. If you get to the create a team step, and you do not see the create a team button, you do not have permissions, and will have to reach out to your Administrator to assist you.
What is a Microsoft 365 Group
A Microsoft 365 Group is a set of people that you wish to collaborate with and easily set up a collection of resources for those people to share. This includes calendars or document libraries for collaboration on files. Adding people to your Microsoft 365 group will automatically assign permissions to get access to the team, and the tools you provide. You will then also be able to have conversations, share files, and notes across the team, that will only be visible to the members of the team.
Creating Your Team
Creating your team is incredibly quick and easy. The first step is going to be navigating to your Teams tab in your Microsoft Teams.
Once you have navigated to this, you will see at the bottom that there is a "Join or create a team"
Now that you have clicked on that, click on the "Create Team"
Once you have clicked on "Create Team" you will be provided with a few options. You can create a team from scratch, or if you have already created a Microsoft 365 group from somewhere else (SharePoint Online, Outlook, or Yammer), you can use those permissions and people. It will also provide you with quite a few different templates, including managing a project, an event, or onboarding employees.
Today, we are going to go with the simple "Create from scratch" option, so that we can learn how to do everything from the beginning.
Now we will have a few options as to who can join our team:
- Private - Only people invited, or with the correct permissions can join.
- Public - Anyone in your organization can join
- Org-wide - This adds everyone in your organization automatically.
We are going to select just a Private Team because we want to be able to have just a few people in here that we can collaborate with.
You are then going to be able to name and describe your Team! We are going to be naming this Blog Team and putting our description in. Now you can click on create. You have now made your first ever team!
It is time to add some people that we want to collaborate with. You can start filling in who you want to be involved with, and it will autofill and you can click to select it. Note that you can also add groups that have already been created.
Once you have found the people that you wanted to add, you simply click "Add" and you will be able to select members. If you want, you can add an additional owner to the channel, if you think it is required.
Adding a Channel
Now that you can communicate with your Team, let’s make it a little bit more organized. If you only have a single channel, it can get a little bit hectic, and make life much tougher for everyone involved.
We are going to add a channel, and we are going to make it a channel in which we will place everything that is complete and needs to be reviewed. We are going to start by clicking on the "…" beside the Team, and then clicking on the “Add a channel” button.
Now, you just need to name, describe, and select the privacy levels for the channel, which is either "Standard" or "Private":
- Standard in this circumstance is everyone can see the channel;
- Private is only selected people in the Team can have access to it.
We are going to name our channel “For Review” and make it public, as we want everyone to be able to review the work that we put in there. Once we have named and described our channel, simply click on "Add".
You now have your own created Team, with an extra channel. You can continue to add as many channels as you feel needed to stay organized and on task. Contact us here at Bloom Software, and we can show you how to make it the most efficient for your workplace using numerous Microsoft 365 tools.
