Teams and Channels for Annual Projects

[Devin_Smith_414]

I am working on an annual project which is in an existing Team with many channels to accommodate the varied discussions and file-sharing amongst collaborators. It's time to begin planning for this year's iteration of the project. Is it best to convert the existing Team into a sort of 'master' Team that has channels notated for each year of the project, or should I replicate the existing Team for a fresh, empty 2024 version. The drawback to the 'master' Team I see is that it will become cluttered by so many channels. The drawback to the fresh, empty Team is that not everyone will have access to the old Team's files and chat history, which would be helpful to have access to. This year's project has many new collaborators. I'm curious to know what the best practice is for annual projects. Thank you for any guidance you can provide!

[#2]

Not knowing how the current is set up, this may or may not work. My first instinct is to use the existing channels and add new folders to each for 2024. If there are multiple folders in each channel for 2023, you could add a 2023 folder to each channel and move files in there to stay organized.

This way, all the previous conversations are right there. And is now possible to rename Channels and the corresponding folders in SharePoint will be automatically renamed and keep the connection.

[#3]

Since you say this is something that is annual, my approach to it would be to create a team template in Teams. That way you could easily setup the template one time and each year you would just create a new team using the template. Easy peezy. If you want people to have access to the previous year's content - then add them to that team also. You could even create a hub site association connecting all of the annual teams to enhance search capabilities to search across all of them if someone is looking for information.

In all things Teams/SharePoint, there is always more than one way that will work. The best practice is going to depend on how the users actually collaborate with each other and the files and/or apps that are used in the team. You want to support your users, so supporting their ability to easily collaborate is going to drive the best practice more than a standard from Microsoft.