Conversations within channels

Microsoft Teams offers the ability to talk to two or more users via chat or within the channels of one of the teams. This is quite reminiscent of traditional chat, but there are a few differences, so it seems appropriate to set aside a special post for this topic. In this text, you will learn about several additional possibilities of cooperation within the channel, as well as how to add an application/service that will be used by all its members …

Once you enter the Teams menu, to the right of the image and team name, you will see several tabs. The default is to see: Posts, Files and Wiki. The Posts tab is a place where you can see all the posts within the channel of which you are a member. Files contain all the files that a team member can access, and Wiki is a special section that allows you to create posts in the format of Wikipedia. This represents hierarchical records and can be useful if you want to form a knowledge base within the channel. The “+” sign allows you to add another application/service within the channel. It can be a OneNote notebook in which all members of the channel will keep records, and it can also be a view of a shared PowerBI dashboard. The possibilities are almost inexhaustible …

As soon as you enter a channel, you will see the contents of the Posts card where you can find the conversation of its members. Each time you want to start a topic you need to select the New Conversation option. Another way to write within the channel is to respond to other users’ posts, which is achieved by clicking the Reply button. Each post is an entity in itself and contains the original message + all subsequent replies.

Creating content is reminiscent of the experience you had as part of a traditional chat. The difference is that for each post you need to specify a topic (Add a subject), and below you write the text of the post.

If you open the format menu above the toolbar you will see another one with several options in the drop down lists. First, you can choose one of two types of posting: New conversation and Announcement. The second option is used for official announcements and contains several additional formatting elements. For example. allows you to create a title, subtitle, choose a background color or a background image …

In addition to this option, you can choose who can do a Reply to the post (everyone, author and moderators) as well as whether you want to distribute the post across multiple channels.

In the upper right corner of the screen there is additional information about the channel and guests. Clicking on the icon marked with the letter “i” will open a panel where you can see detailed information about the channel: description, who last added something, who are the members and guests … In addition, there is a Meet menu with two options: Meet Now, for instant meeting initiation and Schedule a meeting, for planning meetings in the future.