Rules to Better Microsoft Teams - 42 Rules

Microsoft Teams is a great tool for a group of people to collaborate, communicate and share their files.

Teams makes it easy to:

• Centralize communication
• Send emails to Team members easily and quickly by providing a global email address for the Team
• Move away from email attachments and centralize documents

Effective communication with your clients on Microsoft Teams builds credibility, trust and ensures they receive the deserved attention.

Figure: Keeping Teams at the centre of client communication

Client Teams should be prefixed with “Client –“ so it is easier to identify them.

It's usually easier for users to remember where given information is when it is associated with an image/icon. This is especially true for non-technical people or those who are not very familiar with digital workspaces.

Teams is a powerful way to chat, collaborate, and video call with your project team. As soon as you start a new project, create a group chat with all the team members (potentially including the client if appropriate).

Although you will also have a dedicated Team (as per SSW.Rules | Do you know how to create a Team?), which is great for storing documents and files, as well as persisting notifications, you’re better to communicate in a chat rather than a channel.

✅ Pros

• You will be actively notified of new messages
• The conversation flows more naturally (rather than threaded)
• You can quickly call the whole team into a video call

❌ Cons

• People cannot add themselves to a chat so will need someone on the team to add them
• In larger teams, the lack of conversation threading may become an issue

❌ Figure: Bad example - Bad example - Teams | Posts in Teams channel

✅ Figure: Good example - Good example - Use normal chat group for Team members

Group calls are made for important discussions to be had, and distractions can derail them. Ever been in a group call where someone just vanishes? It's confusing and can mess up the flow of conversation.

Using the "Meet Now" button in Microsoft Teams can be an efficient way to start a quick meeting with your team. However, it's important to know when to use it to avoid disrupting your colleagues. Triggering an unplanned call can catch people off guard and disrupt their workflow, leading to frustration and decreased productivity.

Sending appointments from Teams feels less natural than from Outlook but there are some great benefits:

• Appointment - You don’t need to remember everyone’s name - The whole team is invited
• Appointment - In the appointment, it auto-generates a link so that everyone goes to the right place to attend
• Visibility - It shows up in Teams Calendar
• Visibility - It appears in the Teams chat (for the channel that was invited)
• Visibility – When the appointment is beginning the app pops up with a button to “Join”
• History - If you decide to record the meeting, the link to the recording shows up in the chat history as well

Important: Although the meeting app works great to organize Teamwork such as Scrum meetings or other client meetings, it is not very suitable for more global events such as a retreat or a conference. At SSW we use Microsoft Outlook appointments in those instances.

❌ Figure: Bad example - Bad Example - This appointment was created using Outlook using Zoom - the team members needed to be added to the appointment individually and there are too many options on how to join the meeting.

✅ Figure: Good example - Good Example - I know this appointment was created in Microsoft Teams since it was created on behalf of the team (see sender) and at the bottom it has a link so that people can click and join the correct meeting (even without Teams installed)

When a developer joins a team, they need to find important meetings like the Daily Scrum and the Sprint Review. Unfortunately, these meetings are often organized by a team member and there is no way to find them.

Ideally, a new team member would jump into Microsoft Teams and find the team they are joining. Then they would see all the important meetings from within the team and join them as needed.

From then on, they would be able to see those appointments in Microsoft Outlook and edit them as needed.

Teams Meeting chats are only visible to people who were invited to the meeting. If someone joins late or isn’t invited, they won’t see the previous conversation.

If others need to be part of the discussion or you want to continue the conversation after the meeting ends, create a group chat instead.

Waiting for participants to join a meeting can be awkward and make people feel disengaged. It's crucial for the meeting leader to maintain a positive and energetic atmosphere during this time to set the tone for the rest of the meeting.

Everyone in your organisation should be able to see meetings that are relevant to their team (e.g. Daily Scrums). Recurring meetings must be setup correctly so that they are associated with a team channel. This process lets others in your organisation see the meetings associated with that channel.

1. Navigate to Microsoft Teams | Calendar | New Meeting

Figure: Navigate to Microsoft Teams | Calendar | New Meeting

1. Enter the details of the meeting, make sure to add a channel to associate with it!

Figure: Enter the details of the meeting, make sure to add a channel to associate with it!

1. Hit save and you are done, your meeting is all setup.

The status message is often not used but can be quite helpful. People can instantly see what you are up to when they chat with you.

It tells people 3 things:

• What project you’re working on
• The people that you need to speak to (they will get the notifications)
• The location of where you are

Receiving Teams messages after work hours can be stressful, disrupting personal time and mental well-being. Microsoft Teams' Quiet Hours feature helps you create boundaries by silencing notifications during non-work hours. By proactively setting Quiet Hours, you can reduce interruptions, maintain focus during work, and preserve your personal time for relaxation or family.

Dealing with distractions is a fundamental rule to a successful project. Microsoft Teams is a great way to get distracted. Following these options helps you to minimize message distractions:

There is a myriad of options to choose from when storing and sharing documents: SharePoint, or OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive, or Microsoft Teams. The best choice is Microsoft Teams because it brings together the best of SharePoint, cloud file storage, real time collaboration and more into a single location.

Microsoft Teams gives you the ability to sync your files to File Explorer. A lot of people don't realize this feature exits. Let's see how to do this.

Have you ever made a spelling mistake when you named a Teams channel? Have you then tried to rename the Channel? If so you will notice that the underlying SharePoint folder is still named incorrectly.

Figure: Unwanted name on channel

When you're having a discussion about the Northwind ordering system that you're building, you need to see your backlog, and of course, it would be handy to see a OneNote diagram of the workflow. It might also be handy to see an Excel spreadsheet of the stakeholders and testers.

Some information sent via email, such as an event agenda will often be accessed multiple times by recipients. Instead of having to search through your mailbox every time you need the details of an invitation, if you are using Microsoft Teams you can easily set up a page as a tab inside your Team.