Table of Contents
Team Channel Collaboration Might be the Most Important Method in the Future
Among the blur of new features appearing in Teams and the transition to the new Teams 2.1 client is a small but important change in focus to the creation process for new teams and channels. The change to how people create teams is described in MC697434 (last updated on 19 January 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 163364) and is now available everywhere.
Essentially, the change simplifies the flow of team creation by removing complexities such as creating teams from existing Microsoft 365 groups or templates to a separate screen that is only called when necessary. Everything is trimmed back to the basics of giving a name to a new team, describing its purpose, and setting its access type (private or public), with or without reference to a container management sensitivity label.
If you’re interested in managing the discoverability of private teams, container management labels are the way to go as label settings can control how users see private teams in the Join team experience.
All the other options that enrich but complicate the team creation process are now in a separate screen (Figure 1). Organizations that have invested heavily in developing team templates might dislike the change, but the advantage of simplifying of one of the most important processes in Teams cannot be denied.
Team Channel Collaboration Might be the Better Option
The initial screen shown to users who go to create a team includes the option to create a channel instead (Figure 2). The two options are presented alongside quite deliberately. In many instances, people create teams where they could create a channel. By showing the option to create a channel alongside a team, the hope is that those intending to create a team might stop and choose a channel instead.
A single team can now support up to 1,000 channels (including deleted channels). The channels can be any mixture of regular, shared, and private channels with the sole restriction being that there can be a maximum of 30 private channels in a team.
With so many channels available, there’s plenty of room for a new channel to host conversations about a topic. If extra privacy is needed, a private channel can support up to 250 members (all of whom must be team members). If the need is to share information more generally, a shared channel can handle the job within and outside the tenant. Once the topic is resolved or comes to a natural conclusion, the recently-introduced channel archive feature is available to preserve its contents.
The expansion to 1,000 channels was a significant signpost to the future. Creating too many teams is a recipe for wasteful consumption of resources, the accumulation of digital debris in disused teams and SharePoint sites, and the danger that users will lose sight of value in a mass of teams (not all of which are well named or well managed).
Some Hints for the Future
At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando, Microsoft speakers gave some hints that channels receive a lot of current focus in their thinking about how to bring collaboration forward. All types of channels are owned by a team at present, but in the future, it might be possible to have a standalone channel that isn’t limited to the membership of a Microsoft 365 group and the resources available to that group.
Making such a change would challenge the way we think about Teams, especially the one-to-one association that currently exists between a team and a Microsoft 365 group. Challenges still exist in the current model, notably in areas like app support for shared channels where Planner is a much desired but still unavailable app. A new type of channel might be needed to break the mould. We’ll see in time.
Reduce the Number of Teams Created in Microsoft 365 Tenants
In the interim, it seems wise to avoid creating new teams unless they are absolutely necessary. Coach users to understand that they don’t need the full-fledged structured resources that come along with a team for what is often an expanded form of group chat. Instead, whenever possible, use channels in existing teams. Given what we know from the past, better use of channels will probably reduce the digital rot within tenants, and given the hints for the future, might prepare everyone for where Microsoft just might have earmarked as the way to develop the next generation of Teams.
Support the work of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Your support pays for the time we need to track, analyze, and document the changing world of Microsoft 365 and Office 365.