Teams Channels Get Threaded Layout
Many Teams users love to use group chats as a way to get work done. Group chats are effective, but the information shared in chats ends up in personal OneDrive accounts. To help switch people back to channel conversations, Teams has a new threaded layout to make conversations behave much like chats. The new layout works well for some channels but not for others. https://practical365.com/teams-threaded-layout/Teams Tweaks its Discover Feed
The Teams Discover Feed highlights unread items from channels that users might have missed. Microsoft tweaked the feature so that it only works with 5 or more channels. The logic behind the change is that if you have access to less than five channels, the Discover Feed is unlikely to be much use because it probably won’t have many unread messages to show. One limitation is that guest users can’t use the feed. https://office365itpros.com/2025/05/26/discover-feed-teams/Teams to Begin Automatically Hiding Inactive Channels
From mid-July 2024, Teams will begin hiding inactive channels for users. The inactive channels can be unhidden, and users can opt out of the automatic process. The new clean up routine can be invoked whenever users want and if a mistake is made, it’s easy to unhide a channel. Given the number of channels in use, it’s likely that a few in everyone’s channel list are inactive and deserve to be hidden. https://office365itpros.com/2024/07/03/teams-inactive-channels/
Microsoft Teams – Assignments for Specific Channels Without Selecting Students Individually
Hi everyone, Our secondary school is implementing Microsoft Teams with one Team per subject per year level (e.g., "Year 8 Science") instead of separate Teams for each class. The challenge is that multiple teachers teach different classes within the same Team. We want to: Set assignments that are only visible to students in a specific channel (without manually selecting students one by one). Grade assignments so that teachers only see and mark the work of students in their own class/channel, rather than all students in the Team. What We've Tried: Private Channels & Standard Channels: We found that you can’t assign work to a specific channel, whether it’s private or not. Groups: While you can assign work to a group, you still have to manually select each student, which isn’t practical. The alternative is a random selection, which doesn’t help. Saving Groups: You can’t save groups for future use, meaning we’d have to manually recreate them each time we set an assignment. Has anyone found a workaround for this? Are there settings, apps, or best practices that could help? Thanks in advance for any advice!Team Owners Can Rename the General Channel
In what seems to be a small change, team owners can rename general channels (naturally with ‘meaningful names.’ The change is more important than it seems because it’s associated with an effort to make users think about using channels as the basis for collaboration instead of always creating a new team. Being able to rename the General channel might make the channel more useful. After all, it’s just a regular channel. https://office365itpros.com/2024/07/17/rename-general-channel/Team and Channel Creation Simplified in New Design
Team channel collaboration might be a better choice than always creating a new team to host discussions about a topic, especially if channels grow in features. Now that a single team can support a mix of up to 1,000 regular, shared, and private channels, all of which can be archived, is it a good option to continue to create new teams? The answer is probably not, especially if Microsoft continues on a path to develop channel capabilities. https://office365itpros.com/2024/05/10/team-channel-collaboration/Cleaning Out Old Messages from a Team Channel
A question asked about the best way to remove channel messages from Teams. Microsoft 365 retention policies are an option, but you'll have to wait for retention processing to complete. PowerShell helps because you can create a script to remove all messages and replies from a channel. Everything works, but processing is slow, as we discover when we plunge into the details of writing code. https://practical365.com/remove-channel-messages/
Send new Team members personal channel meeting invites automatically
Similar to this Post, but for Teams. Regarding the Send Person Invite feature. It will send a personal invite to current Team members, but not to Team members invited after the invitation was sent. We have to resend or update the invite for it send and invite. It also does not appear on their calendar either. Why do we need to send updated meeting invites?Teams Private and Shared Channels Get Support for Tags
Teams Tags Support for Private and Shared Channels should arrive in targeted tenants soon. The new tag capability uses channel memberships instead of the team roster. It’s a small but useful change, as is the option to start a chat with tagged members. On the downside, Microsoft is deprecating suggested tags. But on the upside, you can include emojis in tag names. https://office365itpros.com/2024/02/22/teams-tags-channels/
