Forum Discussion
Hiding Office 365 Groups Created by Teams from Exchange Clients
Teams doesn't appear in an address list like other mail-enabled objects unless its Office 365 Group is not hidden from the lists, so it is hard to know when private teams are available. Public teams can be found by the Join or Create a team option, which presents a list of suggested public teams available to the user. The search function on the same screen can be used to find other public teams that don't make the suggested list, which is determined by reference to signals in the Graph. Private teams don't appear in suggestions, so the only way to join them is to contact the team owner (how you learn about the existence of the team is another matter - perhaps via a coffee room conversation?).
Its very unlikely for me as a member of the "IT Team" to also be a member of the "Sales TEAM" and therefore I have no option to contact the whole sales team, without adding every single member into a private chat
The simple solution is to create a mail contact in your tenant directory for a channel email address in the teams that you think people will want to email. The mail contact will be in the GAL and can be addressed like any other email recipient. Messages will show up in the channel in the target team and can be actioned there by the sales team or whatever. And if you are nice, they might invite you into the team.
Seriously, this discussion shows that moving from Outlook to Teams is not possible if you still need some of the functionality available in Outlook...
- Interesting idea, but we're possibly talking past each other - or I'm just misreading this :) Also sorry that I'm derailing the original purpose of that thread.
I'm not interested in Outlook to Teams communication, which would work just fine by adding the groups smtp address into the TO: field.
If I were in a Teams only environment (no Outlook available), how would I contact a different team/department without being a member of that private team?
I'm basically missing the feature to @mention a team which I'm not a member of, or a direct private chat with a team that I'm not a member of.
It is that missing functionality, that would keep me from hiding Teams from the Outlook UI or the GAL. Teams enhances team/department-internal communication, but kind of prevents cross-team communication.The ability to @mention a team would require you to know the name of the team, no?
It's worth also saying that if you do not hide groups (used for teams) from Exchange, you will certainly see them in the GAL and other address lists, and you will be able to send email to those groups, but there's no guarantee that your email will reach anyone because a) the members of the team you send email to might never look at conversations in the group mailbox, which is where email will end up, and b) the group might not distribute copies of conversations to members in email, so the message won't reach members that way either...
