General

• Use Teams for program, project, and department level collaboration as well as general and external collaboration.
• Set up a Team with a larger group of people and set up topic specific channels — this will minimize the number of teams that requires a person’s participation. For more best practices on organization teams, click here.
• Use Teams to drive cross-organization collaboration
• Regularly archive old information — Archive or remove old files to keep the most up-to-date files on hand and as projects are completed.
• Hover over the back and forward arrow to revisit where you have been in Teams — located on the top left of the screen
• Integrate your favorite apps — OneNote, Planner, and more. For more information, click here.  
• Use the Microsoft Teams mobile app to access Teams from any device — To download for IOS, click here and for Android, click here.
• Remove any team members that are no longer part of the team or the Yale community. For more information, click here.
• Delete Teams that are no longer in use — For assistance, contact the ITS Help Desk at 203-432-9000 or visit the ITS website to submit a request.

Customization

• Personalize Your User Experience — change personal settings and notifications. To learn how, click here.
• Set your availability status — Let others know your availability status by clicking on your profile icon in the top right of the screen and choose your status.  For more information, click here.
• Use background effects — to hide your background if you are working in a distracting or sensitive environment. To learn how, click here.
• Manage your activity feed — to ensure you do not miss any correspondence
• Consider using the Focus time feature — This allows others to know if you are unavailable via your status. Any messages or emails will be sent to you when your set focus time ends.  
• Use the status change notification — to be notified immediately when a person’s status changes to available.
• Add another Team Owner — To help manage the Team in your absence. Go to the team’s name and select More Options *** > Manage team. In the Members tab, under Role, select the down arrow and change Member to Owner.

Chat

• Chats — Use chats for one-to-one messaging or group chats not pertaining to a specific topic.  Post specific topic messaging in the corresponding Team channel. For more information, click here.
• Use like and reactions — use likes to confirm you have read the message and use a reaction to endorse or agree with the message
• Use @everyone tag — in chat and channel posts to communicate with all Team members.

Channels

A Team is made up of channels dedicated to a specific topic, department, or project.

• Choose the type of channel that fits your team’s need — Standard (available and visible to everyone) and Private (focused, private conversations with a specific audience).
• Create channels to focus discussions — helps people know where to go to contribute and find information based on topic
• Pin your most important channels — If you many channels, pin the most important ones to make them easy to find. To pin a channel, choose one to pin, right-click, and select More channels > Pin.
• Set up Auto favorite to make sure the channel show’s up in everyone’s channel list — Go to the team’s name and select More options *** > Manage team. In the Channels tab, select Auto-favorite.
• Add tools — such as OneNote and Planner so that members have everything they need in the channel
• When creating a new channel, a new folder is created in the Shared Document library of the SharePoint site for that Team. This means that you can organize your content via channels if you want to. It also means that having a channel called ‘Documents’ or ‘Document Conversations’ is a bad idea. The launch of Private Channels will further impact this structure as it is likely that permissions will be applied to the private channel folder.
• For more information on Channels, click here.

Tabs

Categorized areas located under the Team Channel

• Posts tab - This is where conversations happen within a channel.
• Files tab - This is how you get to the channels file storage area.
• Consider adding frequently used files, web sites and external apps as tabs – within the channel. If there is something you use frequently for  work related to a channel such as opening a file stored there frequently, visiting a website related to work the channel is involved with, or an external application you frequently use to facilitate work consider adding it as a channel tab to ease workflow and cut down on having to manage multiple apps, documents or sites outside of Teams.
• Do not use too many tabs. If you add too many tabs on a channel, everyone will quickly lose track of information. Ideally, use as few tabs as possible, limiting it to critical and most commonly used items. But do not avoid tabs altogether because the tabs are essential to streamlining workflow.

File Sharing

• Avoid uploading files directly to chat — Doing this will cause files to appear at the bottom of the General tab instead of in their proper folder in the Files tab.
• Create a folder structure to organize files — upload files to topic specific folders.  To share, click on Copy Link at the top of the folder and easily share a direct link to the file in chat, channel conversation or email.
• Co-author in real-time — work together on the same document in real time by sharing the file in Teams. Click here to learn how.
• For more information on how to share a file, click here.

Meetings

• Host meetings in a channel — to invite all Team members to a specific meeting, click on the Add channel box in the middle of the “New meeting” screen, and from the drop-down menu that appears, select a team and a channel. This will announce the meeting in the channel’s Posts tab and will send an email invite.  Any member can reply to the announcement or add files or other relevant information in the post so you can reference it during the meeting.  For more information, click here.
• Record your meeting to share with those unable to attend — Make everyone aware that you are recording the meeting.  Click here for instructions on how to record, playback, and download the recording.
• Close all other windows before screen sharing — this will prevent oversharing of potentially sensitive material on your screen
• Use the meeting notes feature — As a team you can collaboratively take notes during the meeting that will be automatically saved and attached to the meeting to easily reference later. To learn how, click here.

To learn more about Microsoft Teams, review the Microsoft Teams video training.

For any questions regarding Microsoft Teams, contact the ITS Help Desk at 203-432-9000 or visit the ITS website to submit a question.