Microsoft Teams - Part Two - Adding New Channels To The Teams And Best Practices

In the last article “Office 365 – Microsoft Teams – Part 1 – Introduction to Teams and Channels”, we offered an introduction to teams and channels. In this article, we will discuss some advanced points regarding channels.

Adding a New Channel to the Team:

There are various ways to add channels to the teams. Following are the approaches:

1. Through client applications like Desktop Client, Web Client (Through Web Browsers) or through Mobile client - Mobile App
2. Through Graph Explorer
3. Programmatically using CSOM
4. Using PowerShell CMDlets

Adding a channel manually through client applications (Desktop Client, Web Client, Mobile Client): It's very easy to do this.

1. Select the team to which you want to add the channel.
2. Click on callout menu in front of teams and select the “Add channel” menu as shown in the below figure 1
   
   
   
   Figure 1: O365 - Teams - Adding Channel

3. Once we click on “Add channel”, and “Create channel” a dialog will appear as shown in the below figure 2.
4. In this, we need to specify the “Channel name” here as I specified – “MY C-sharp Corner Team” and channel description as shown in below figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: O365 - Teams - Create Channel dialog - Adding Channel to Team

5. When any member adds the channel to the team, that channel by default is set as a favorite for the creator.

6. There is one more option in this dialog: “Automatically favorite this channel for the whole team”. When we select this option, this channel becomes the favorite for all the team members.

7. But then what happens when we mark the channel as a favorite:
   
   Consider the scenario, where my team has lots of channels, by default channels are ordered alphabetically. But if we marked the channel as favorite, it comes on top and it's easy to navigate my channels.

I’ll explain this with an example: I have added the following two channels to My Team,

• FunChannel
• My C-sharp Corner Team as shown in the below figure 3
  
  
  Figure 3: O365 - Teams - Added Two Channels

Here, by default both the channels are favorites of my user, since I created those. By default, they are shown in alphabetical order after “General” channel.

Now I’ll unfavorite “FunChannel” and see the result in the below figure 4,

Figure 4: O365-Teams-Demo of Favorite and Unfavorite channel

 

Observe the result in the above figure 4, as I unfavorited the “FunChannel” it got hidden and my favorite channel “MY C-Sharp Corner Team” channel appeared on top below the “General” channel.

Best Practices for Channels

1. Please be very specific while naming the channel name since channels are ordered alphabetically after the “General” channel. So, in case there is a  large number of channels then it’s helpful to give a proper name.
2. Mark the channel favorites to your specific channels which you want on the top if there is a large number of channels which will save time.
3. Each team should add the channels based on their topic, work, project deliveries, priorities, scenarios or actual logical reason.
4. Use “General” channel to share team objective, team goal, announcements, news, team introduction or introduction of a new team member or a general purpose which is common for the whole team.

References

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/best-practices-organizing