Will Teams Ever Be Designed To Work With Networks?

[forrestdean]

Teams looks like a great application.  I currently have Teams set up and deployed to my entire network that came with Office 365 and is networked through Azure Active Directory.  However, after going through all the settings and countless Google searches and forums, Teams is apparently not designed for a network environment with multiple departments at this time.

Will Microsoft Teams ever be designed to work in a network environment with multiple departments?  Below are some of the things I would love to see added to Teams.

1.  The ability for members of one team to communicate with members of another team without having to be a member of the team they want to send a message to.  Currently, members of a team can only communicate with members of the same team and have no way of communicating with members of another team unless they are a member of that team, which defeats the purpose of having a team for each department if everyone on the network is going to be a member of each team anyway.  I even tried creating a team that includes all members of the network with multiple channels.  However, you only have 2 options to define the channel.  One is private and the other is standard.  A member of a private channel cannot communicate with members of another private channel.  And standard channels include all members of the team by default with no option of including specific users which again defeats the purpose of having a channel for each department when everyone is going to be in every channel that is standard.

2.  Send a broadcast message to teams or channels, or send a chat message to other users so that the message does not disappear after a few seconds.  There are many times when I have to send a broadcast message to a department or the entire network for various reasons such as shutting down or rebooting servers, phone systems, etc.  However, there are many cases when a user is not at their desk when the message is delivered.  By the time they get back to their desk the message I sent will already have disappeared leaving a highlighted Teams icon on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen that no one would hardly ever notice.  The same goes for sending a private chat message to individual users.  The message pops up on the screen for a few seconds then disappears.

I currently us Softros for our messaging needs, but it's not perfect either, and since Microsoft Teams comes bundled with our Office 365 package with a lot of nice features, it would be great to be able to use this product in our network.  Unfortunately, until it is designed to include the ability to work within a network environment with multiple departments we will have to continue using Softros.  I'm hoping Microsoft Teams will update its software in the near future to accommodate business environments.

[#2]

@forrestdean I work for an organisation with 300,000 staff, and Teams works very well for us, so I'm not sure really what you mean by working with a Network.

Some suggestions.

1. You are perhaps on the right track with one team if your organisation has less than 5000 staff, then using channels for departments, it's a good and open way to work. Show your users how to use Show/Hide to keep only their department in view, then when someone @mentions that channel only the people who show the channel will be alerted. It's not a security boundary, as you observed that would prevent departments talking to each other.

2. Many people don't really work as a department, more as cross department teams to deliver a specific project or goal. Teams is great for this, create workgroups where they can hold all the resources in that one place for that subject, every file, message, tasks, even the web apps they need. It's like self filing into a common context.