Adding Conversations inside MD Teams; using Outlook Vs using the MS Team desktop application

Steel Contributor

From Office 365 admin center i created a new MS Teams, which have automatically created a new Office 365 group  + SharePoint Modern Team site. Also when i added members to the Office 365 group, the new MS Teams appeared inside the users' Teams desktop application.

 

Now there are 2 ways to add conversations to the MS Teams:-

1. using the desktop application >> Conversations tab, as follow:-

desktoptop.png

 

2. OR using the Conversation inside the sharepoint team sites >> which will actually open the users' outlook, as follow:-

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So my question is what are the differences between adding the conversation using outlook or using desktop application? as adding conversation using one method will not show it inside the other, for example i added a conversation using the desktop application, but it did not show inside the users' outlook accounts, while it showed inside the users' desktop applications....

9 Replies

Confusing isn't it @john john ?

 

Conversations inside Teams is a channel conversation

 

Conversations as visible inside the SharePoint site is a shared mailbox in Exchange so email to the office 365 group address will land here.

 

They are in no way related. I tend to remove the Conversations link in the SharePoint site if not used - to avoid this confusion amongst users.

 


@Ian Moran wrote:

Confusing isn't it @john john ?

 

Conversations inside Teams is a channel conversation

 

Conversations as visible inside the SharePoint site is a shared mailbox in Exchange so email to the office 365 group address will land here.

 

They are in no way related. I tend to remove the Conversations link in the SharePoint site if not used - to avoid this confusion amongst users.


@Ian Moran  thanks for the reply.. but all the UI and the way they are presented makes users think that the 2 conversations are the same .... this is really confusing .

now in my case i want to have a conversation (chatting) features inside my sharepoint site (similar to conversation inside MS Teams desktop app), but we want to do the conversations from the sharepoint site itself using a web browser rather than using desktop app, so can we benefit from the conversation we got ?

Think of it this way. First of all we had Office 365 Groups, with an associated group SMTP address. Email to the group landed here. This was great for support related groups - eg support@company.com. Everyone in the group could see the email and respond.

 

Then along came Teams. This is layered if you will on top of the Office 365 Group. Each channel in the Team has an associated SMTP address.  The Team itself does not have an SMTP address - the underlying Office 365 group does.

 

How can this be used ? Well, you could still have email coming into the Office 365 group - visible as Conversations in the SharePoint site. You could then have internal discussions around this email inside a channel by forwarding that email into the appropriate channel (right click channel name to grab the address)

 

 

 


@Ian Moran wrote:

Think of it this way. First of all we had Office 365 Groups, with an associated group SMTP address. Email to the group landed here. This was great for support related groups - eg support@company.com. Everyone in the group could see the email and respond.

 

Then along came Teams. This is layered if you will on top of the Office 365 Group. Each channel in the Team has an associated SMTP address.  The Team itself does not have an SMTP address - the underlying Office 365 group does.

 

How can this be used ? Well, you could still have email coming into the Office 365 group - visible as Conversations in the SharePoint site. You could then have internal discussions around this email inside a channel by forwarding that email into the appropriate channel (right click channel name to grab the address)

 

 


@Ian Moran  But the chat i am thinking of is something similar to modern team sites chat or yammer chats ,, as we are working on building our intranet community site, where this site is an free area to start conversations and share photos, i thought the conversations tab inside modern team site will do this job for us, but it is not intended to be a real chatting in the way we want. so i am left with 2 options; using the commenting capabilities inside modern page, so when a user want to start a new chat he will create a new modern page, but the issue is that comments inside modern pages can not be backup-ed using any tool (as they are stored outside the site collection, in a onedrive as i read before), also any user can delete others comments and the deleted comments will not be stored inside the site collection recycle bin!!!!. i have not used yammer before, but not sure if it will provide a more professional chatting capabilities. and if users can start a new yammer chat from sharepoint..

SharePoint itself doesnt offer this chat capability, and probably never Will! What it does offer is the capability to add web parts to it, for example Yammer, which is the tool to use for org wide communication!

 


@adam deltinger wrote:
SharePoint itself doesnt offer this chat capability, and probably never Will! What it does offer is the capability to add web parts to it, for example Yammer, which is the tool to use for org wide communication!

@adam deltingerbut in yammer case, when we create a new yammer group conversation, we need to add new web part inside sharepoint to reference the new conversation is this correct? which will not be very practical. i am looking for something similar to how the classic "Discussion board" list work,where it has its own permissions on who can create new posts and also users can reply and like the posts... so not sure what is the modern replacement for the classic discussion board lists?

There’s none out of the box afaik! This is basically the things Teams and Yammer are for nowadays
There might be custom solutions or you may build something with SPFx,

@adam deltinger 


@adam deltinger wrote:
There’s none out of the box afaik! This is basically the things Teams and Yammer are for nowadays
There might be custom solutions or you may build something with SPFx,

now building a custom solution is always a valid appraoch if sharepoint/offic-365 does not provide the feature we are looking at. but in my case, i created a new yammer group, then inside sharepoint i added a new yammer web part and i chose the yammer group, this allowed me to show all the yammer conversations inside a sharepoint page + users can create new yammer posts from sharepoint page..

Yeah, that’s what I said was a valid approach :)