Merging Teams chats and channels

Brass Contributor

It seems quite some time ago since this query was raised - when will it be possible to merge teams channels/chats (and maintain chat history)? Thanks.

11 Replies

@sianowen currently there is nothing on the roadmap for this, but it is on the backlog. Add your thoughts perhaps to this item in the feedback portal.

 

Enable transfer of project (channel) from one team to another · Community (microsoft.com)

 

 

Every feedback link I have found on this issue results in a 404. Is nobody at Microsoft interested in addressing this request? It would seem to be a pretty basic feature for a platform like Teams, but they seem incapable of making it happen.

@mrpommer https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/db899330-7ebd-ed11-83ff-002248273995?q=merge+chan... is the latest ms platform for feedback... Yes, it has changed multiple times in the last few months.

I have 6 pinned chats and 6 pinned teams. Having to constantly switch tabs to use one or the other is infuriating. Having recently migrated from Slack, its leading to my team using the "teams" (aka groups in Slack) less and multiperson chats more. That's hurting content visibility since the "teams" based content is visible to the whole team, but the chats are not. I suspect its because my other team members are not switching tabs to over to the teams tab and are just staying on the chats tab.

revamping a team and would like the new team to be able to see the discussions of the previous team.  How is this acomplished?  

This is spot on! Not a good UX to go back and forth all day long.
Exactly. Would really like to see Microsoft address this issue.

I cant agree with @juliusindi  more.

 

For context, our primary use case is using Microsoft Teams with software engineers and developers. What we've seen happen in our org, is a development team will cling to the "Teams" or "Chat" persona of Microsoft Teams, but not both.

 

The Teams persona and the individual channels offers certain features we wish Chat had; like inbound notifications, better bot integration, calendars, tab features, @'ing a Tag, etc... But, for our engineers, they don't collaborate well through the primary "Post" functionality of a Team. A post is the mainstay of collaboration in a Team, and it is very clunky for this kind of communication. A post has mandatory threading as everything is grouped into a "conversation". It is greedy with vertical space. Its more akin to a Twitter / X feed for a Team.

 

The Chat persona, specifically Group Chat offers features that we wish the Teams had; like not requiring everything to be in a Conversation, with mandatory threads. Easy to compose chat UI (easier than a Team channel), with fewer clicks and mouse interaction. Its more natural to collaborate in a Chat, than a Team Channel Post. Back and forth about getting work done is easier to process in Chat, than a Post format.

 

Why can't you create a Tab in a Teams Channel, which is formatted like a Chat, but inherit the features of that Team Channel? Then the busy, back and forth, collaboration can happen in the Chat tab. And the long standing Posts, announcements, general discussion can happen in the Posts tab? To recycle this idea, you could create multiple Chat tabs in a Team Channel, and key them to conversations, then archive them for reference later. Or, we could assign a Chat to a Team, without a Channel as a parent. As a kind of "Random" or "Misc" Chat to be used for sharing the best meme's of the week :smirking_face: 

 

To quote Microsoft support documentation:

"When you go to any channel in Teams the very first tab is Posts. Think of this as one big group chat. Everyone who has access to the channel can see messages in Posts."

Source

 

I would argue, that the majority of collaboration between users of Microsoft Teams, who come from an engineering background, do not view the Posts tab as an avenue for group chat. The user experience drives these individuals away from Posts, and into Chat. So, bring the two together so we avoid context switching, and mainstream our collaboration.

@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.