Forum Discussion

juliusindi's avatar
juliusindi
Copper Contributor
Apr 21, 2023
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.
ITChristian's avatar
ITChristian
Copper Contributor
Aug 29, 2023
Exactly. Would really like to see Microsoft address this issue.
  • D3vM4n's avatar
    D3vM4n
    Copper Contributor
    Sep 19, 2023

    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 😏 

     

    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."

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/first-things-to-know-about-chats-in-microsoft-teams-88ed0a06-6b59-43a3-8cf7-40c01f2f92f2

     

    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.

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