Best Practice

Learn about the varied offerings Teams provides and experience the best results by following these established processes:

Chats

You can use Microsoft Teams for private 1:1 and group chats without the need to create a team.
Any IMs you receive whilst offline will be available next time you come online.
Conversation history and chats are persistent. This means that your conversations stay around even after closing the application
Make sure you do not share sensitive information that you do not want all invited participants to see within a chat. They will be able to read the chat even if they do not join the meeting, or, if they have already been disconnected
You should use a separate email or Teams chat for private conversations amongst a sub-group of colleagues

You can invite up to 250 participants to a meeting in Teams
You must use a compatible browser when using the call/meeting feature (Chrome/Microsoft Edge). You will receive an error message if attempting to join a meeting in any other browser via the web app
Schedule your meetings from Outlook if you have the Teams desktop application installed or create immediate conferences using Meet Now.
Meeting chat is visible to anyone who receives an invite to the session regardless of whether they join.
Guests (or one-time attendees) of a recurring meeting or series have full access to the chat. They will see current and future chats even after leaving the meeting.

When a Microsoft team is created a SharePoint site is also automatically created. Each channel within your team will correspond to a folder with the document library
Any files that are shared within a Teams conversation or via the channels files tab are automatically added
Any permissions are translated from the SharePoint directly to the Teams site
In order to create a new document as a tab, it must first be uploaded otherwise the file will not be available to add

View threaded conversations within your team channel to prevent scrolling through long email chains
Your activity feed provides you with a range of notifications. These include a colleague mentioning you, liking something you posted or replying to a thread you started and replying in a channel that you are following.
To seek your colleague’s attention @ them using their NHSmail address and they will receive a notification. If enabled by the Team owner (your local admin), you can also mention an entire channel
If you want to limit your notification, visit the track activity icon and select accordingly
You will see a presence status to reflect your availability in the top right-hand corner of your team’s page. These can take from 2-4 mins to update

Updated on 13/03/2020