A Team is a group of users who work together on an ongoing basis across a range of issues and topics. Channels are sections within your Team that organise your conversations.
An introduction to Teams
Teams are for discrete groups of users who work together on an ongoing basis across a range of issues and topics. Team spaces allow you to have conversations, collaborate on documents, make announcements and plan tasks. The key limitation to these spaces is that adding new users gives access to the full scope of the Team (excepting Private Channels) so are not suitable for engagement with ad-hoc stakeholders. If you decide that you want to create a Team, start simple and do not be tempted to create too many channels from the outset.
Creating your Teams
Implementing Office 365 is a key component in delivering the university's Digital Strategy to help the university deliver its mission, vision and strategy.
The Digital Strategy is aligned to the Strategic Plan through four parallel themes, all of which focus on people and experiences. Some of its driving principles underpinning these themes are simplifying processes, providing a consistent look and feel across all platforms, considering Information Security at all times, and working as part of One University to ensure the delivery of consistent and efficient services supporting all areas of university life.
What are Channels
You can add groups of individuals to a Team using distribution lists or contact groups. However, the membership of the Team will not update automatically if the distribution list or contact group membership is updated once the Team has been created. However, Team members are only automatically removed when their university access is removed at the end of their employment or studies at the university.
For example, you use a university generated distribution list set up for your department to create a Department Team. The Team is created and a new starter joins your department. The new starter will need to be manually added to the Team. Similarly, when someone leaves your department to move to another area of the university they will need to be manually removed from the Team.