Randy Dean walks through creating a Microsoft Teams team and organizing it with channels. He covers public vs. private teams, built-in templates with pre-configured channels, and how to add members, post conversations, and launch Office apps directly in channels. Use channels to mirror sub-projects, events, or functional areas.
Chapters
All right. Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, the Email Sanity Expert. I'm going to continue on with these new videos that I'm making that are really quick tip videos on Microsoft Teams. And I'm going to share today one of the most basic things that you're going to want to do if you have a Microsoft Teams account, and that is setting up a new team in Teams, including some new channels. Uh, so let's get in and talk about how you can set up a team and set up some channels within the team. And, uh, to make this video work a little better, I don't know if you watched my last one, but I started getting pixelated. I'm going to go ahead and put this thing on, uh, video pause so I can go right into my Teams. All right, so we'll go into the Microsoft Teams, and the first thing I want you to see is that depending on what you were working on previously, you're going to probably open up to some location in Teams. I happen to be in my Teams tab right now, but you might be in chat or possibly down in your meetings. And I want to go into my Teams tab one more time. Uh, we'll click on that here real quick. And the first thing that I always like to do when I pop into my Teams tab is just click on the teams that are open right now. It just cleans up the page a little bit. And then if you want to create a new team, you can come right down here to where it says Join or Create Team. And you click on this, and then it gives it— it's real simple, hit Create Team. But now here's where things get sort of interesting. Notice that they give you several template options down here. And the first one I want to click on is right here, Manage a Project. This one, as you can see, it's got a General channel, an Announcements channel, a Resources, and a Planning channel. And it also automatically sets you up with OneNote and a wiki. Hold on, now let's take a look at this. I'm going to close this one. Let's go back in here to create team. Let's look at the manage event, which gives you many of the same channels, but it also gives you budget and logistics and marketing, PR and website and YouTube. And what I wanted to do was show this to you because they've set up some templates here. For things that might be fairly common things for you, like project management, event management. Although I sometimes think that one might almost be better than the project management for projects because it's got that budget tab. Onboarding new employees, uh, 365 adoption within your organization. And then if you keep going down here, you'll notice they've got some stuff that are templates for different types of business models: government, financial services, retail, healthcare. So I would just recommend you dive down and look inside of these templates to see if they might already have something sort of built that might save you some time in setting up your team. That being said, let's just talk about how to do this. Now, to remind you, I'm going to close this again. I hit Join or Create Team. I'm going to hit Create a Team, and I'm going to do that from scratch this time. Now you have a choice. Do you want to do it public versus private? Private's going to require permissions for the people to get in. I'll just keep this easy and make it public this time. And, um, let's just do something sort of silly. All my Randys. This is the team for all of the Randys. We're talking email here. Okay, so now, now the description sort of tells people what's going on in this team. And obviously I'm creating a bit of a goofy team here, as you're going to see here in a second. I'm going to hit create. Now what happens is it creates the team and it'll say nice work. It's making the team in the background, and one of the first things it's going to ask you to do is start adding some people to your team. Well, let's do this. How about, uh, my Timelyman account? How about my regular business account? And how about my Yahoo account? Now remember, I'm making this in my Timelyman@outlook account, so I'm going to hit all of these and it's going to basically add these people into the team. Now what's going to happen is once you have that, I'm going to hit close. Now I've added some members to the team, and now because I've added the members to the team, now notice that I can do certain things. I can have posts, I can have files, and I can have a wiki. Wait, a wiki? What's a wiki? Hold on a second. Now notice this, you can come in here and let's ask that question. What's a wiki? Guess what? I'm not going to tell you what a wiki is. This because I think that is a good topic for my next video. Okay, so we're going to get in and talk about that in an upcoming video because I don't want to go too deep on this. But I do want to show you that you can actually come in and make posts. You can start a new conversation. You type something in here and it basically creates a chat for this tab, this channel inside of this team. So it's a, it's a specific chat for this channel inside of this team. Additionally, you can post files. Now let's go up. I, I have another one that's up here, my YouTube channel one, and let's open this one up a little bit. Now notice that you can see the channels that have already been created, uh, inside of any one of the teams that you've created by simply clicking on the word for the team name, and that opens up sort of the channels that have already been built. And in order to make new channels inside of here, you can also come over here to the ellipses and hit Add Channel or Add Member. And let's say somebody threw you on a team you don't want to be on. Well, hey, you can leave the team. Um, the other thing that you can do though, which is sort of interesting, is let me come down here and come into Channel Logistics. Um, this one, what's going to happen is it says let's get the conversation started. Uh, I can actually come in here and take a look at edit this channel. And if I do this, then I can sort of see what's the description. Oh, nitty-gritty tasks, comments, end screen cards, et cetera. So this sort of gives you the idea, you know, if you want to see sort of what the channel's about, one easy way to do it is just click on the button, hit edit or view, and see what comes up. Let's come in here to channel marketing and let's see if I've added anything inside of files inside of here. And notice that this is where you can go to get files. This is the marketing PR. Actually, I think I might have done some down here under video ideas. So let's take a look and let's click on Files and see if there's anything. No, there's not. So let me do something here. Uh, let's come in and you can do New. Now this is sort of interesting. This will open up sort of the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, or Forms. So you can actually open up a new document here, or you can just do upload and get a file or a folder from your computer. And so in this case, well, here's my YouTube guide and here is my V2. So I can get all of the versions of the YouTube guide that I have, uh, and I can bring those in, and they're going to, as you can see, upload, and they're going to become part of the files that are available in the video ideas segment of this channel. And you can basically do that kind of stuff while you're in here. So in essence, the way that I want you to think about this is you have the team, and within the team you create channels that could be your subprojects, that could be, um, your event planning or activities that are taking place. Maybe you've got some channels for specific people. You can sort of set it up how you want it to be to match your needs for that team. And like I said, you know, if you take a look at some of these, some of these are in project management mode. So as you can see, my website's got content, marketing, PR, and planning. And some of these, it's all got hidden channels. I did this with the project management tool, and it's got announcements, budgets, and logistics sort of hidden because I'm not using those ones yet. But you can see those. How did I do that again? All I did was click on Hidden Channels and it shows me what's hiding there. And notice that if I want— let's say I want to add Logistics, I can hit Show and it's going to become part of my dropdown list inside of this team, the Website team, which is now closed. And so it's really sort of a way to structure what you're doing inside of your Teams app. By making teams inside of your teams. Alright, I'm going to bring myself back here. Uh, let's start the video back up. Hi everybody, and let's bring this back into full screen mode. Uh, and so in essence, this is sort of you building your structure inside of your teams. You're going to use the Teams app to set up the teams that are specific to your work, whatever those teams might be. Now you might be the leader You might be a member. And once you set up that team that you're probably going to be the leader on, if you're building the team, you can then do basically specific channels for different parts of that team. You can then inside of each channel have posts. You can post your files. The post, remember, is a conversation thread. And you can have your wiki, which will be a future video. I hope this all makes some sense because in essence, the way I'm looking at these tools is that this is sort of the next step up from Microsoft Outlook in terms of giving you the option to do significantly more collaboration, sharing, coordination, and consensus building, and project event person management. That's what's going on here. And if you open your mind up to that idea, it gives you a whole lot of capabilities. And we didn't even talk about just general chat for the whole organization, as well as of course the Teams video meetings options. There's a lot going on inside of this thing. All right, so what's going to happen next here? Uh, let me get myself a little bit out of the way here and make myself just a bit smaller. Hey, hi, uh, I am building a program on this topic for my clients. They've been requesting it extensively. Uh, one of the things that I'm going to be doing is building quite a few of these little snippet videos for a piece at a time to put onto my YouTube channel and into my online e-learning academy. In the comments below, I'll also be making a playlist of all of these Microsoft Teams videos, and I'll probably do the same thing for Zoom and maybe even for GoToMeeting and a few of the other tools that I'm using all the time as professional speaker and trainer. I basically am sort of expected to know all of these platforms. It's been a lot of fun learning all of them the last several years. So if you'd like to learn a little bit more about me and my programs, just go out to my website, randaldean.com. If you'd like to see those e-learning options, click on the e-learning tab on randaldean.com. If you like these videos, please hit like, please subscribe to the channel. Both of those things help a lot. And if you'd like to get some tip sheets, including one tip sheet that gives you links to some of my favorite videos from my own YouTube channel, but also tips on Microsoft Outlook, Google Suite and Gmail, smartphones and tablets, and some of these video meeting tools, send me an email, randy@randydean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you out more information than you probably need, but hey, maybe some stuff that you want too. All right, thanks everybody. Hope you had fun.
