Best Practices for Teams

You’ll undoubtedly develop your own ideas about the best way to set up and use Teams, but here are some principles that I recommend. 

Start Simple 

• Resist the urge to create many Teams and Channels up front. Making Teams over-complicated will deter your users. 

• Similarly, resist the urge to add many apps.  You’ll want to add some later, but getting everyone comfortable with the basics is very worthwhile. 

Leaders Use Teams 

• If the organization’s leadership at each level doesn’t commit to using Teams then successful adoption is unlikely.  

Use Teams’ “Help” 

• It’s quite good. 

• Searching for help on a topic is often effective 

File Location Strategy 

• Plan to locate files using the following hierarchy 

• OneDrive – For personal Files 

• If the individual leaves the organization it won’t matter if these files are lost 

• Teams – For Group Files 

• If an individual leaves the files are not lost 

• Files here are valuable for the intermediate term 

• SharePoint – For Organization-Wide and Archival Files 

• One does not need to use SharePoint while getting started.  It’s conceptually complex and requires notable attention setting up. 

Keep the Desktop App Open (or web page)

• but not necessarily showing.   

• That way notifications will appear immediately and can be addressed.  This makes chatting efficient. 

• Along with this, encourage users to update their status 

• To see how search “set status” from help 

• I’d note that I’m not very good at this – I leave myself as “available” most of the time. 

Take Advantage of “Search” 

• It’s very capable, although it takes some effort to take advantage of it. See my page on search.

  • AI Search - As of late 2024 I find that Google Gemini, Perplexity, MS Copilot are often quicker and more useful.

Everything has a URL Link 

• To make access easy for your users, copy that link and put in in chats, posts, or emails. 

• This is true for Teams, Channels, Posts and Files 

Best Practices from the Web 

These sites provide Best Practices with which I generally agree. 

• Changing Social – Best Practices (as of 2022)

• 10 Best practices for setting up and using Teams and Chat 

• PK Tech – 8 Best Practices for getting the most out of MST channels 

• Condensed presentation 

• I particularly commend the idea of starting simple and then expanding, particularly for the number of channels 

• Everyday Etiquette in MS Teams 

• This is a much longer set of multiple best practices divided into areas.  They are  

1. General 

2. Channels 

3. Private Channels 

4. Channel Conversations 

5. Files 

6. Private Chat 

7. Apps 

8. Meetings and calls – This may be of particular interest to Strong-Families 

Updated: 12/19/2024