By Erin Kester, Senior Consultant | June 20, 2024
Microsoft Teams weaves together tons of collaboration options, but it can get a bit overwhelming to find things when you’re a member of lots of Teams, or when your workload gets especially heavy. Happily, there are lots of ways you can help your colleagues and help yourself make it easier to find the content you’re looking for.
Making a new Team? Be intentional about purpose and naming
If you’re a Team owner, or creating a new Team, consider that Microsoft Teams brings together the appropriate people for a specific purpose, such as a business unit, project, or process. Naming a Team based on its intended use helps people find it and understand what it’s for. Likewise, naming the channels to reflect their thematic topics helps users know where things should be happening in the Team. Good Channel names also help people who like to look for files via SharePoint or OneDrive, since the Channel folder will be recognizable outside of the Teams interface.
Living in Teams? 10 Ways to Improve Your Findability Experience
As a Teams user, you can do a lot to find things faster. Using these 10 good practices and the native features of Teams will help you enhance visibility, make Teams notifications count, and take advantage of filter, Find and Search.
- Critical file? Tab it: Tabs can make important file resources or apps more visible in a channel. Take a less is more approach so tabs aren’t hidden.
- Make your post stand out: Use post subjects to create a visual shift of topic in the channel. This also helps Teams search.
- Make it Sticky! Pin important posts that you need to remain visible to Team members for reference.
- Ping the right people: @mention the right people on posts that affect them or require their action so they will be able to use the Activities feed to locate posts using the @mention filter or by scanning by date.
- Create notification tags: Leverage the Tags feature to create mini distribution lists in your Team by clustering relevant users under a single @mention tag. This notifies the individuals as if they had a personal @mention.
- Filter it: Use the Filter tool in your Teams list to locate the right Team and Channel or filter your Activity Feed for Unread items.
- Know the channel a post was in? Use Find in Channel to search channel posts for specific words or phrases. It’s fast and accurate.
- Need to find a phrase in a chat? Chat is like a ping pong match, but Find in Chat is now available to search text in posts within a specific chat window, including meeting chat.
- Want to cast a wide net? Teams search can look across all your Teams and Chats, with refiners that help you narrow your results.
- Know what type of info you’re looking for? Use up-front limiters in Search to search only People, Files, conversations, etc. across all Teams.