What are Channels?

Within Microsoft Teams, the Channels feature can be invaluable when organising your workflow. A Channel is a place for a team to share messages, tools and files and can be grouped into different categories based on how you work.

Teams are made up of channels, which are the conversations you have with your teammates. Channels sit inside of teams, similar to how files sit inside folders. Each channel is dedicated to a specific topic, department, or project.

Example

For example, the Northwind Traders team has General, Marketing, Overview, and 35 more channels. All the conversations, meetings, files, and apps in the Marketing channel have to do with marketing, and everything in this channel is visible to everyone on the Northwind Traders team.

Every team that you have setup in your organisation has a default “General” channel, which can be used for a number of different reasons, but particularly in larger teams, it can make sense to split the team up further into smaller Channels that are focused more specifically on an individual aspect of the work that the team does.

Channels have tabs that you will find useful when taking advantage of the features of Channels. The “Posts” tab is the Channels main chat and use threads, which means that replies to a message will be nested under the message that has been replied to, meaning that conversations can be easily followed as the thread stays together to make it easy to follow.

The “Files” tab is used for all of the fiies that have been shared in the Channel. These files can be shared with other members of the Channel, and posted into chat messages in order to bring the file to everyones attention.

The final default tab is “Wiki”, which can be used as a knowledge base for the Channel and the topic it covers. This can be added and edited as your team grows and can assist as a reference for new members coming into the team.

In addition to these default tabs, further tabs can be added at any time for specific things that are regularly used by the team as part of the Channel. Simply click on “Add a tab” at the top of the Channel and you will be offered a selection of different options that you can make use of. As well as this being a very useful feature for teams to make use of, it also allows you to tailor a Channel for how a specific team work, meaning that even within the same organsiation, Channels can be setup entirely differently specifically for how that specific team works.