Microsoft Teams: a five-minute overview

In this short overview we walk through what Microsoft Teams actually replaces, and where organisations tend to get the structure wrong.

Teams sits on top of Microsoft 365 Groups and SharePoint. Every team you create quietly creates a SharePoint site, a Group, and a mailbox. That is why an unplanned rollout produces hundreds of orphaned sites within a year.

Start with a naming convention and an owner policy before you let people create teams freely. Two owners minimum, so a team never becomes unmanageable when somebody leaves.

Channels are where most of the confusion lives. A standard channel is visible to everyone in the team. A private channel gets its own SharePoint site. A shared channel can be opened to people outside the organisation without adding them as guests.

Finally, decide what belongs in chat and what belongs in a channel. Chat is not searchable in the way people assume, and it is not covered by the same retention policies. If a decision matters, it belongs in a channel.