The Constellation Service Desk

What is a 'Team' inside Microsoft Teams

A team is a group of people gathered to get something big done in your organization. Sometimes it’s your whole organization.

Teams are made up of channels, which are the conversations you have with your teammates. Each channel is dedicated to a specific topic, department, or project.

For example, the Northwind Traders team has General, Marketing, Overview, and 35 more channels. All the conversations, meetings, files, and apps in the Marketing channel have to do with marketing, and everything in this channel is visible to everyone on the Northwind Traders team.

Channels are where the work actually gets done—where text, audio, and video conversations open to the whole team happen, where files are shared, and where apps are added.

While channel conversations are public, chats are just between you and someone else (or a group of people). Think of them like instant messages in Skype for Business or other messaging apps.

FYI—If you're working in Teams offline, or on a low-bandwidth network, you'll be able to switch between chats and channels and keep working. You'll see everything from the last time we were able to sync to your network, and we'll trickle messages in as bandwidth allows.

Team Members and Roles

Every member in Teams has a role, and each one has different permissions. 

• Owners
  Team owners manage certain settings for the team. They add and remove members, add guests, change team settings, and handle administrative tasks. There can be multiple owners in a team.

• Members
  Members are the people in the team. They talk with other team members in conversations. They can view and usually upload and change files. They also do the usual sorts of collaboration that the team owners have permitted.

• Guests
  Guests are people from outside of your organization that a team owner invites, such as partners or consultants to join the team. Guests have fewer capabilities than team members or team owners, but there's still a lot they can do.

The following table shows the capabilities available for each role: