Microsoft Teams: Create and Setup a New Team
Teams can be created and setup by any employee without the need to involve IT. The process is relatively easy and straightforward. The reasons for creating a new team varies, here are some common reasons:
- Project Management
- Team Collaboration
- Group Management
- Planning
Managers and supervisors are encouraged to create Teams groups for their employees and teams to come together and collaborate in an organized and central manner. Project Managers can bring project collaborators together to centralize documentation, work, planning, and management, leveraging built in tools and/or apps.
This guide will show you how to setup a new Team. In this particular scenario we are setting up a Team to centralize documentation and communications related to business processes.
Setup the Team
1. Open Microsoft Teams and go to the Teams tab
2. Click "Join or create a team" at the bottom of the teams list
3. Click the "Create team" button
4. Give the Team a name and description
5.
7. When your Team is ready, you will see the below screen
8. Next, add members to your team and assign access levels
- Owner: Has full access rights to the team, including ability to add or remove members. Typically this is Managers and Supervisors
- Member: By default can post, upload, edit, and fully interact with the teams and conversations. Additional restrictions can be applied by channel if desired.
9. You can invite External individuals to the Team by entering their full email address and then click "Add ... as a guest". Guests have reduced access and functionality, but typically are able to effectively operate and access everything a member can. Additional restrictions can be applied if necessary.
10. Click close when done adding members and guests
Your Microsoft Team is now created. You may want to create Channels to start organizing your team and collaboration efforts.
Creating Channels
Best practice for Microsoft Teams is to create channels for specific topics or areas of collaboration instead of using the General channel that is created when you setup your team. Channels can be public to the group or you can make them private and include on specific people. But keep in mind that you cannot change the type (private or public) after you have created the channel.
1. Click on the "More Options" (...) button next to your team name in the Teams list
2. Select "Add channel"
3. Name the Channel, set a description, and set privacy settings
you can also check "Automatically show this channel in everyone's channel list" to ensure that this channel is always shown and not hidden for all team members.
4. Complete Add to complete the channel creation
Setup Folder Structure
5. As an extra step, I will be adding a basic folder structure to this team so that files that are added can be well organized from the beginning. To do that I will go to Files in my new Channel
6. I'll add a few folders by click New and selecting Folder
7. Give the folder a name and then click Create
Setup a Project or Planner Plan
Since the team I just created relates to a project, I'm going to link it with an app that lets me manage projects. Office 365 has 2 native project management tools to choose from: Microsoft Project Online or Microsoft Planner. Though both are similar, Microsoft Project Online requires an additional license and for HPG IT to assign that license, though it is more functional and has more features. Microsoft Planner, on the other hand, is a free tool included with Microsoft 365, but may lack some more advanced features such as creating a road map for the project. There is also a few 3rd party applications that are compatible with Teams, such as Jira or Assana.
I selected Microsoft Planner for this team.
1. In the General Channel, click the Plus sign at the top of the channel page
2. Search for Planner and then click the result to begin setup
3. Name your Plan and click Save
4. You can now create buckets for your team to organize their tasks and project workflow. Buckets are used as stages for tasks assigned to team members. Setup as many as you need, but try not to overdue it. Click Add new bucket and name it.
5. You can start adding tasks and assigning them to team members.
6. You can click on a task to edit it further, including adding a checklist, description, start date, progress, end date, images, documents, etc.
Each task can have its own set of conversations and collaboration.
Note that your new Plan or other apps are added as a tab to the channel, providing quick and easy access
You can change the view of your plan to List, Charts, or Schedule to meet your needs
Managing Permissions and Members
If you need to remove members
1. click the "More options" (...) button next to the team name in the list of Teams
2. click manage team
3. From here you can Add, Change, or remove members
If you need to change Guest access rights:
1. click the "More options" (...) button next to the team name in the list of Teams
2. click manage team
3. Go to Settings tab and then Guest permissions
4. Enable or disable as appropriate
To Limit permissions to the General channel (or other channel):
1. click the "More options" (...) button next to the team name in the list of Teams
2. click manage team
3. Go to the Channels tab
4. Click the "More options" (...) button next to the channel in the list
5. Click Manage channel
6. Change the permissions as needed
