What’s the best type of Microsoft Team to Create?

Private

This is the most used type of Microsoft Team. It is frequently used by departments to provide a safe and secure place for their internal conversations and document collaboration.

By default, employees will not have access to a private team. It then relies on either the IT department, IT support provider or Owner (Super user) of the Team to add members.

Department Team

Tip: We often refer to the Private Team as the Department Team. We find that this terminology is easier to understand and clear to end users who are adopting the system.

Public

To avoid confusion, Public does not mean that external parties will be able to add themselves directly into your Team.

Public means that by default employees will not have access to a Public team. However, unlike a Private team an employee can add themselves into a Public team.

These can be very useful for projects where employees will come and go frequently from the Team.

They can be used for ADHOC social chats about specific topics. Which during the Coronavirus lock down where a lot of people will be self-isolating, providing a platform for social interaction can be very beneficial to your employees overall mental health.

Project Team

Tip: We often refer to the Public Team as the Project Team. We find that this terminology is easier to understand and clear to end users who are adopting the system.

Org-wide

This type of Team will automatically add everyone in the organisation who has an Office 365 license that gives them access to Microsoft Teams into the Org-wide Team.

For small to medium sized businesses we would only expect to see one Org-wide Team. These Org-wide Teams are brilliant for pushing out latest updates and information about the Covid-19 outbreak and your latest guidance. It replaces the need for long email threads and chains which contain everyone in the organisation.

Only allow specific people to post into Teams

It is also worth noting that you might want to only allow specific people to post into the Org-wide team to stop it from becoming chaotic and overwhelmed with unofficial messages.

To do this you would “disable” posts from Members of this team and only allow Owners (a.k.a Admins) of the Team to post messages.

To do this simply click on the more options on the right-hand side of your “General” channel inside your Team, then select “Manage Channel”, then select “Only owners can post messages”.