Forum Discussion
Merging Teams chats and channels
juliusindiwrote:
I have 6 pinned chats and 6 pinned teams. Having to constantly switch tabs to use one or the other is infuriating.
YES! This is the reality of working with MS Teams, especially in a professional setting. I am constantly having to switch back and forth between the Teams and Chats tabs. Constantly having to remember whether the conversation I want is a team channel or a chat, then move through several steps of navigating and visually reorienting to get to the conversation I want. The "Activity" tab seems like it should help with this, but it doesn't.
Why can't we have one collection of pinned conversations that is always visible, combining team channels, individual and group chats?
And why can't we have one collection of recent conversations that is also always visible, again combining channels and chats?
The MS Teams UI is designed with an emphatic separation of these two categories of things, teams vs. chats, and forces an extremely cumbersome navigation path between the two worlds. Like someone on the product team thinks it's really important for me to constantly be aware of the difference between these two things. Long after I've mastered this very simple distinction, I have to keep "proving" that I understand it. Why? Who am I doing this for?
Micorosoft product team, please have mercy on us and fix this.
- 100% agree with all of this. We struggle with users having missed communications because they don't toggle back and forth between tabs. Also, have lots of duplicate meetings where one series started and another began but someone else started the second meeting series so now there are 2 meeting chats - need to be able to merge.
- This is exactly the reason I am here too.
- Yes, wanted to reply just to reiterate this is my own experience and difficulty as well.
I've also tried to advocate for usage of Posts in Teams Channels as a way to create a throughline for certain lines of communication, but to no avail. It's just not intuitive and people really don't enjoy using it. Worse, they will create separate posts to reply to an existing thread which clogs the entire Channel up and makes the experience very disjointed.
My other pain point is creating small group chats of 2-4 people and then having to add or make a new chat when we move onto a similar but related issue. Slack solves this by using tags, but we need a way to merge chats in a similar manner to how we can add and remove people from group chats, for a smoother experience. At the very least, making a group of group chats might be helpful if we have to keep the underlying structure due to Team's architecture.
