Communication / Interaction between different teams?

[Florian Hein]

Let's assume we wanted to structure our teams to resemble our org chart teams, how could we ensure that they can communicate between teams? I must admit I'm new to teams but to me it seems there's no way that a member of team Sales can interact with a member from team Marketing am I right?

I read that it might be best practice to create and structure teams around an initiative or common project.

Is something like cross team communication planned?

Thanks for your reply and keep up the good work.

[#2 · Accepted solution]

I've always used to the layered approach here. Creating an Org wide, or larger department type Team with everyone in it, and the channels over their departments that I tell them to follow your channels in that Team, this way you can cross mention departments (@channel mentions) in this Team to have entire cross department capabilites.

Ideally thou, Shared Channels would be amazing here. Dan Stephenson talked about them looking at Shared Channels at last year ignite but haven't heard anything since. I'm hoping that with Private channel infrastructure gets laid out, that shared channels could be right behind which would give us a gateway to cross department chats by having common channels show in Teams.

[#3]

Thanks for your reply. I agree that shared channels would be very nice. Like you mentioned, perhaps the most voted feature request 'private channels' will lay the groundwork for this to happen in the future. For now it might make most sense to create one large channel for the organizational division so that members of each corresponding team can communicate with one another. And the then have a Team for each organizational team within that division. Wouldn't you agree?