How to Quickly Create Teams in Microsoft Teams

The Importance of Teams

 Just like in a physical office, structuring your organisation with teams is just as important when using Microsoft Teams. It helps you manage your people and workflow and facilitates effective collaboration.

Create effective teams quickly

Teams are the atomic unit of productivity in the workplace—and in Microsoft Teams. A well-designed team brings together channels, tabs, and apps that combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. Templates in Teams bring together those exact ingredients to help users create teams quickly for effective collaboration. Let us show you how.

When creating a new team, users soon will be able to choose from a variety of customisable templates depending on the purpose of the team. Options will include common team types like event management and crisis response, as well as industry-specific templates like hospital ward and bank branch. Templates are standardized team structures that come with pre-defined channels, tabs and apps—providing an effective team structure out of the box and helping users discover relevant capabilities.

Users will be able to customise the team name, description, and channel names when creating a team from a template.

After the team is created, users will receive guidance on how to best use and further customise the team. Each template will come with its own getting started guidance.

Initially, Microsoft will publish 12 first-party templates spanning key business scenarios and industries so that users can hit the ground running with Teams.

Create new templates for your organisation

In addition to leveraging first-party templates from Microsoft, organisations can create their own custom templates to fulfill unique business needs. This allows IT teams to take proven team structures for common scenarios and deploy them at scale across an organisation. From the Microsoft Teams admin center, admins can easily create new templates from scratch, modify existing templates, and even templatise an existing team.

During the creation process, admins can define the channel structure, tabs and apps that make up the new template. By packaging relevant LOB apps* into templates, IT teams can effectively surface them to the right members of the organization.

All templates, whether first-party or admin-created, can be managed and modified from the Microsoft Teams admin center.

For end users, templates created by the user’s organization will appear at the top of the list of available templates during team creation, making them easily discoverable. In the future, we will release policy-based controls that enable admins to target templates to specific users.

Templates in Teams are important building blocks for IT teams and partners to build custom experiences for their users. We can’t wait to see what templates you’ll create.

*Apps that are packaged into templates will still require users to possess the requisite licenses.