What is a Team? And how to Create a Team

Teams are a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization.

  • Teams can be created to be private to only invited users.

  • Teams can also be created to be public and open and anyone within the organization can join (up to 5000 members).

A team is designed to bring together a group of people that work closely to get things done. Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations). Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.

Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—-whatever works for your team! Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint

How to create a Team

Click Join or create a Team at the bottom of your teams list. Then click Create a new team.

Choose Build a team from scratch.

Next, you’ll want to choose what kind team you want this to be:

  • To limit content and conversation to a specific set of people, choose Private.

  • For a community or topic that anyone in the organization can join, choose Public.

 

 

If you're a global admin, you’ll see an option to create an Org-wide team. These are great for situations when you want to automatically add all users in your organization.

From there, you can name your team, add a description, and edit the team's data classification. Once you've done that, you can invite people, groups, or even entire contact groups (formerly known as "distribution lists") to join your team.

How to create a Channel

To create a new channel, start in the team list. Find the team name and click More options(...)
 > Add channel. You can also click Manage team, and add a channel in the Channels tab.

You can create up to 200 channels over the life of a team. That number includes channels you create and later delete.