Create teams quickly with Templates in Microsoft Teams
Published May 19 2020 08:00 AM 166K Views

Today we are thrilled to announce Templates in Microsoft Teams, enabling you to create effective teams faster and more easily than ever.


With Templates in Teams, users can choose from a variety of customizable templates when creating a new team, helping them get started quickly. IT professionals can also create new custom templates for their organization, allowing them to standardize team structures, surface relevant apps, and scale best practices. Templates in Teams will roll out in the next few months.

 

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.

1.png

 

When creating a new team, users soon will be able to choose from a variety of customizable 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.

2.png

 

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

3.png

 

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

4.png

 

Initially, we 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 organization
In addition to leveraging first-party templates from Microsoft, organizations 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 organization. From the Microsoft Teams admin center, admins can easily create new templates from scratch, modify existing templates, and even templatize an existing team.

5.png

 

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

6.png

 

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

7.png

 

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.

8.png

 

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.

81 Comments
Bronze Contributor

Great addition! Highly requested!

Brass Contributor

This looks awesome! Lots of great features coming 

Brass Contributor

When is the feature going to be available?

Copper Contributor

So excited this is finally arriving! So many industries need something to make their collaboration and productivity work for them. 

Brass Contributor

Cool! I didn't see any mention of SharePoint, will the templates include a custom SharePoint site? For instance if we always want a custom issue tracking list for projects could that be included?

Copper Contributor

Finally the much anticipated feature. Wondering how this works with AIP Sensitivity Labels that we have enabled. Will the template allow you to configure the appropriate sensitivity label?

Silver Contributor

Kill your custom player with fire!

Copper Contributor

I hope you'll be making your existing EDU templates available in the Commercial space. There are many, many organizations (think also of many, many partners) that deliver training (think "training on how to use Microsoft products") such that EDU organizations may only be a small portion of the organizations that would benefit from these features.

Brass Contributor

Great!!! Any info about timing/roadmap? (and scope)

Copper Contributor

Great addition! Long awaited to easily create templates

Copper Contributor

This is definitely a nice addition, thanks for this great extension! 

Copper Contributor

Can you add a Project Management template? There are a lot of PM’s currently managing projects via teams during the epidemic. Would be a great feature to have even as we start transitioning back to the office.

Bronze Contributor

This is great inclusion will be highly needed for most of the Companies and orgs that are looking for standards in regards to Teams and its settings, i am not sure when is the ETA @Microsoft_Teams_team secondly I have another question where and when we will get a kind of preview user options where we could be a tester for most of these latest features same like windows insider or office insider builds I know for Teams there are some TAP but that has its own NDA, etc highly appreciate yours response on this @Microsoft_Teams_team

Copper Contributor

Great tool, looking for template management for a long time. This is needed more for SharePoint (this is where document management takes place) than for Teams. Unfortunately teams manager just focuses on Teams.
If this tool gets into the hands of techies only, the risk is very high that you end up in a couple of months time with hundreds of templates and the end user community is lost differentiating which template should be used for what and how they differ. Governance is necessary and a diligent team (business and IT) based on clear rules, when a new template will be defined. Also the ownership of the templates is necessary. Otherwise the saying "a fool with a tool is still a fool, making disaster happen faster" is very valid. 

Brass Contributor

I notice in the article admins will be able to target templates to sets of users (presumably via policies). What about controlling who can create a team from scratch? 

 

If a template is loaded up with some startup content, a Planner tab, or customized channel file permissions, will those be carried into the new team?

Copper Contributor

It's a great feature!

 

It will be much easier for the end users to setup the proper Team settings and from the admin point of view, it will reduce the number of misconfiguration follow up -less Azure Sentinel Incidents! Add compliance and security for the organization.

Been waiting for this in education but disappointed in how it is lacking.  For Education, Files and content being missing is a major missing component. I my environment, each Program cohort has its own Team. Each Team has multiple learning modules (channel). Each Channel Has its own teachers with their own developed class notebooks and teaching resources (from pre-Teams). Cohorts from the same program share many resources and now we will need to replicate them manually instead of being able to indicate during the template build whether or not we want to include them in the template.

Ideally, having the optional ability for each Channel (learning module) to have its own class grade book , having assignments separated by channel (instead of all assignments in instructor view being in one pool) would be much desired.  MS should not be thinking that each instructor has their own team for every class taught. MS should not think that instructors create teams. End meeting only happens when the organizer (scheduler/team creator) ends the meeting. Designated Presenter/Instructor should be able to End the meeting. Also only meeting organizer/scheduler can get the attendance report. The burden on the instructors for reporting class attendance has not changed. The class organizer/scheduler should be able to designate additional organizer/presenters (instructors).

Copper Contributor

Great feature ! looking for template management for a long time. Any information about the roadmap?

Microsoft

@BarryCoombs @Jan van der Heide It will be available in the next few months! Initially we'll ship the ability for end users to choose a template during the create team process, and the ability for admins to create new custom templates for their organization. In the future we'll ship richer functionality like Template policies for improved IT manageability.

Microsoft

@hoderd The initial set of 1P templates that we publish will not come with pre-built SharePoint sites! 

Microsoft

@ShaneGibeault We will include a project management template when this feature ships!

Microsoft
@KarinMock  Thank you for feedback! Absolutely agree that governance is key. Initially only admins will be able to create new templates. In the future if we enable end users to create templates, we will build in the necessary admin controls and policies to prevent unfettered creation of new templates.
Microsoft

@brkcanada Thanks for the question! Initially, only admins will be able to create new templates. Initially they won't be able to pre-load content/files into templates, but we are working on enabling that in the future. 

Can not wait to get my hands on this one :) 

curious if an approval process is included 

Brass Contributor

This will be an excellent addition to our tool kit and combined with Site Designs it will help to reduce the need for PowerShell scripts and premium services such as HTTP Requests within PowerAutomate or Logic Apps.

We just need Site Designs to catch up with the PnP Template code to reduce reliance on premium services :)

 

Iron Contributor

Have you remembered the rest of the Office 365 Group this time? Templates for Teams will only be of any use if they cover the associated SharePoint site, OneNote notebook, Planner plan andand other apps which get created with the Team. For example, SharePoint version control settings and custom views, OneNote sections and pages and Planner Buckets and tasks. This could be amazing, but I don't see how it's an improvement on what we already have (create from existing Team) if the above aren't included. 

Iron Contributor

@Max Shen  -- re your response @hoderd - to confirm, we will  not be able to have a customized SharePoint along with the team?  I have a desperate need for both that compliment each other with SharePoint being a public facing site to be replicated with few changes ( with content and actions)  but the team being a template of work steps and chat that are all very similar regardless of the team.  A real loss if I we can't do that. 

 

Also, would you please address the comment by @Oz Oscroft,  "This could be amazing, but I don't see how it's an improvement on what we already have (create from existing Team) if the above aren't included. "  So what is the improvement?  

 

Thank you. 

Iron Contributor

Is this GA? Has anyone seen it in the wild? Dates?

Brass Contributor

This is a good start for sure. But, a template, as they are configured now, does not bring over any content or tabs (the tab "stubs" are there but the owner must configure each one). What is needed are these capabilities:

  • copy the configured tab and its content (eg, if pointing to an in-team document) to new team - all tabs should be configured and working where possible
  • create a new plan if a plan tab is in the template
  • copy all current settings, folders, pages, etc. in the modern sharepoint team site underneath the team
Copper Contributor

Hi, I have a class of students who need to be randomly paired by threes to complete a number of different negotiations. Each of these 3-party negotiations needs a separate channel and I find I'm spending a lot of time creating all of these channels. Is there a way or an app that can take all the members of a team, automatically generate the needed channels, and randomly assign students to them? 

Brass Contributor

@Shona630 a power app could be created and tabbed into your team to do this. Probably not that difficult to achieve.

Copper Contributor

Thank you, @brkcanada  for your reply. That would be so great! Could you direct me to some information on how I could do this?

Brass Contributor

@Shona630 well, if you are not a power app person and are not familiar with the Office Graph, you have some learning to undertake... does your school division/district have people that can help you with this? 

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/teams-concept-overview

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/get-started-with-powerapps/

Copper Contributor

@brkcanada thank you for the info and links. I'm not a power app person and don't even know what the Office Graph is, but I love learning new things and enjoy a challenge. I'll look into it, thanks again!

Iron Contributor

Can we pre-specify a doclib for the SharePoint app? Or (say) a spreadsheet for the Excel app?

Copper Contributor

Cool feature.

 

Like some others have pointed out it would be nice to have the option to copy content into the new template.  Example you fire up a new project it creates channels and populates them with content, we can do this in SharePoint.

 

Thanks!

Copper Contributor

Any date for this feature to be rolled out? We are planning Teams deployment for next academic year and it would help us a lot.

 

Thanks

Copper Contributor

Hi community! 

Any update on when the feature will be rolled out? 

Thanks

Copper Contributor

Along with the Channels will you be able to have some documents in the Channels as part of the template?

Copper Contributor

This is a huge help! Will it be possible within a Team to have a Channel template to set up projects, too?

Copper Contributor

When is the feature going to be available?

Copper Contributor

Announced in may and still no release date, niether even in the roadmap. We've lost hope to use it for the next academic course :(

Copper Contributor

The 365 Roadmap shows this features is slated for release in Q3: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Teams&searchterms=template

Steel Contributor

Any idea when this is scheduled for rollout? it  has been two months and no sign of any updates in the message center about this feature. 

 

As provisioning teams is a manual strain on support we would like to reduce

 

Thanks

Copper Contributor

Great work!

 

Only 1 slight issue affecting me. As a Teams admin, the "Teams Template" menu is not available in the Microsoft Teams admin center.

 

Any idea as to the required permissions or steps required to make this available.

 

Thanks  

Copper Contributor

Hi. This would be great feature. However we have a requirement where we need to include documents & the channels while we create a team from existing team(we have some project management related document structure). Can this be achievable at this moment using any workarounds as I see there is no straight solution to this. Any help is really appreciated. 

 

Thanks

Brass Contributor

@ParnaSonata what you will need is a post Team creation script that provides the additional structure and content. Essentially all those elements can be provisioned via script using what is called the Office Graph API. It's not complicated (my developer colleagues tell me) but you need to be thoughtful about the architecture you are trying to achieve.

Copper Contributor

@brkcanada Thank you so much for your quick reply. Can you provide a little more information on this please. While we try to achieve this using scripts, can we even include the documents and channel links and settings from an existing teams. We are creating teams with certain project management folder structure and channels for different teams in our organisation. Most of the documents are common for these teams. When we create new teams using this as template, it does clone the folder structure and channel names etc, however the documents within does not get copied. We need to upload them manually. Can we achieve this using scripts. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Thanks.

Copper Contributor

Screenshot.png

To elaborate I am including an example: We have a team Team_Project which has General and Docs, Docs include Standards document. When we create Team_Project_2 using Team_Project as template, General and Docs get copied but Standards document is missing in Docs. Its mentions that documents are not included as of now(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/get-started-with-teams-templates).  

Brass Contributor

@ParnaSonata Yes you can use scripting to copy documents from one place to another. The account running the script would need access to both locations. If you have standard project templates, etc., perhaps store them in your PMO (could be a SharePoint Online site or group) and using scripts copy relevant docs over to your new team channel files. You can also script provide a Planner plan on a tab in the team. I can't comment on the specific scripting details as I'm not a scripting person but my team does this. We created a Team Creator Power App that allows the user to pick from a set of template teams and the tool provisions the new team and using scripts, creates additional tabs, private channels, copies documents, creates plans, etc. We will also be creating an app for PMs to create a new channel in a client team for a new client project with a SOW tab, Project tab, and other standard template content.

Version history
Last update:
‎Jan 26 2021 12:10 PM
Updated by: