In another blog post this month, we talked about how to create and manage Teams within Microsoft Teams. After you’ve created a team, you’ll probably want to populate it with content! In this post, we’ll walk through how to add and manage Channels. The FAQ has a great primer on Channels — check out this post to learn where to find it. Channels are the biggest “containers” within a Team and contain content and conversations pertaining to some theme. A Team can have many Channels, but a Channel only relates to a single Team.
To get started, sign in to your Microsoft Teams instance and select the Teams section, then select the Team you’d like to work within. You can either select the three dots next to the team name and click “Add channel”, or select “Create more channels” if your Team doesn’t have content yet:
Give your Channel a name and description, then click Add:
After you’ve created the new channel, take a peek at the additional options by clicking on the three dots next to the channel name:
Note the “Get email address” option. If you select this, you can grab the channel’s email address and add it to your mail client. If you select “advanced settings” you can adjust the privacy settings for the email address. You can also remove the email address completely:
If you send emails to that address, they’ll appear in the Conversations tab of the Channel. Any replies you make here will only be visible in Microsoft Teams, however–it will not send a reply email:
You can also look at what Connectors are available to you in the channel. Connectors allow you to, well, connect to other Microsoft and Third Party services. We’ll take a closer look at some of these connectors in more detail in a future post, but I encourage you to try out relevant Connectors for other services you use. Note that you can sort and search for Connectors:
You can also follow/unfollow channels, favorite/un-favorite channels, edit, and delete them from this menu:
As always, if you have any questions about this post, please feel free to drop a comment below or shoot me an email at megan@marksgroup.net. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for sharing. I have a problem. I can’t see my original post in one of my channels. The first thing that appears is a response to that post. How can I be sure that I am seeing everything that has been shared in a channel?
Hi Trudy,
Ok, I just did a little testing on my Teams instance, how strange! You should be able to see the original post–ESPECIALLY if you were the one who wrote it! I was going to say, the only thing I can think of is if you were added to the Team after the Channel was created, and maybe it wasn’t letting you scroll back to before you were added, but that’s not the case. Huh. Can you see the original posts in other Channels?
Also.. Teams doesn’t tell you when you reach the “beginning of time” for that Channel, unless you’re looking at the General Channel. In that case, if you’re able to scroll to the top, you should see a “Welcome to the Team” graphic. Channels that are NOT the “General” channel just stop when you get to the top. I think that would be a great idea for the MS Teams User Voice site. If you have any other questions you can reach me at megan@marksgroup.net.
Thanks!
Megan
I created a channel and now I want to add people to start a conversation in the Channel but only to just this channel and not to the whole Teams itself. How do I do this?
Hi Leslie,
As far as I am aware, you cannot add a non-team member to a channel within that team, without actually making them a Team member. I’m not sure if this would help, but Private Channels are available to use, more details on that here
Hello,
I want to combine a channel (with all documents in it) into another new channel I’ve created. How do I do this? Without losing any previous documents from the original channel.
Thank you.
Hi Michelle,
This is not yet possible, but Microsoft currently lists this feature as “under review” on the UserVoice site.