Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Teams: Chat, Meetings, and Channels
If you’re new to Microsoft Teams, the platform might feel a little overwhelming at first. It’s packed with tools for messaging, video calls, collaboration, and file sharing—all in one place. But once you get the hang of the basics, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool for work, school, or personal projects. In this beginner-friendly guide, we’ll cover the core features: chat, meetings, and channels. These three areas form the foundation of how Teams works. https://dellenny.com/beginners-guide-to-microsoft-teams-chat-meetings-and-channels/
New enhancements in Private Channels in Microsoft Teams unlock their full potential
Private channels have long empowered focused collaboration among a subset of a team’s members. Whether you're managing sensitive projects, driving confidential initiatives, or simply need a space for more targeted discussions, private channels offer the control and privacy your team needs. Now, private channels are evolving to meet the needs of modern teams. In response to customer feedback, we are introducing enhanced flexibility, greater scalability, and streamlined compliance management. Read on to learn about these key enhancements and how to prepare. Why Private Channels Matter Private channels offer a dedicated space for conversations that benefit from added structure, persistence, and control. They’re especially valuable when navigating sensitive topics like budgets, HR discussions, managing project-specific workstreams, or collaborating with clients and vendors who require limited access .While chat are ideal for quick exchanges, private channels help keep discussions organized, make shared files easier to find, and help ensure conversations remain accessible over time, all while giving you more control over who can access. What’s Changing—and Why It Matters To support growing usage and help simplify compliance, private channels will now use a group mailbox (like shared channels) instead of storing messages in individual user mailboxes. This change unlocks several key benefits: 🚀 Expanded Limits Feature Current New Max private channels per team 30 1000 Max members per private channel 250 5000 Meeting scheduling ❌ ✅ Supported Simplified Compliance At a user level Group Helping to Simplify Compliance By aligning private channels with group-based storage, compliance policies (e.g., retention, legal hold, DLP, eDiscovery) can be applied at the team (Microsoft 365 group) level, helping to reduce complexity and driving consistency across channel types. For example, one retention policy can be applied to the team’s group, instead of managing a separate policy for private channels. Organizations with compliance policies (retention, legal hold, DLP, eDiscovery, Optical Character recognition) for private channels must ensure those policies are also applied to the team’s group scope before migration begins. Existing policies for user mailboxes will continue to apply; post-migration, new private channel data will be governed by policies of the group mailbox. What Compliance Admins Need to Do To enable a smooth transition and help maintain compliance coverage, follow the below: Microsoft Purview Hold and eDiscovery Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, update hold policies to include the team’s Microsoft 365 group mailbox in addition to user mailboxes. After Migration: New data will reside in the group mailbox. For full eDiscovery, search both user and group mailboxes. Note: Private channel message history (edits/deletes) in user mailboxes under an existing hold will remain in their preserved user library folder until the hold expires. Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, update DLP policies to include team’s group. After Migration: Check that the DLP policies are scoped to the group mailbox for private channels. Microsoft Purview Retention Policies Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, go to solutions à Data Lifecycle Management à Retention policies Create Teams channel messages policy scoped to Teams having equivalent Retention type and duration similar to existing private channel retention policies. After Migration: Set retention policies for the parent team with all channels in the team in mind, including private channels. Microsoft policies for Optical Character Recognition Before Migration: In Microsoft Purview compliance portal, go to Settings à Optical character recognition (OCR) à Select locations and scope to [1] all users and groups or [2] specific users and groups After Migration: Set the settings for “all users and groups” to cover private channels as specific users and groups are not supported. What’s Next This update helps make private channels more scalable, manageable, and compliant. It’s a big step forward for organizations that rely on Teams for secure, structured collaboration. Migration is scheduled to begin in late September 2025 and is expected to be completed by the end of December 2025 for the worldwide cloud. During this period, private channel data will gradually move from user mailboxes to the team’s group mailbox. Private channels can be used throughout the migration. Special cloud migration will happen in early 2026. Migration can start or end at different times for each tenant during the rollout period. To track progress, a new PowerShell command will be available for tenants to check whether their migration has started or is completed. This post will be updated soon with details on the PowerShell command. We’ll be updating public documentation soon and will share links here.Teams - Camera and screen share issue
Hi, Since yesterday we have been having firm wide issues with camera usage and screen share in Teams calls. When user 1 calls user 2, user 1 can see user 2s camera and screen share. User 2 cannot see user 1s camera or screen share. It seems to be that the recipient cannot see camera feed or screen share, but the original caller can see incoming camera feeds and screen shares. We have tried fully reinstalling and nuking local cache, but no luck. Before we start looking a bit deeper, has any others had this at all. Many thanks guysFrom Threads to Workflows: Microsoft Teams Features That Boost Everyone’s Productivity
Organizations are looking to achieve more—and need tools that help them work faster, simpler, and smarter. Guided by customer feedback, Microsoft Teams continues to evolve. Earlier this year, we launched the new chat and channels experience: a unified, streamlined interface that brings simplicity by default, with powerful capabilities just a click away. We’re introducing the next wave of innovations in Teams, with features like threads, multiple emoji reactions, and emoji-triggered workflows. These updates help make collaboration more open and organized, bringing together people and, increasingly, AI agents. They also boost personal productivity by automating routine tasks and enabling you to adapt Teams to your work style. Threads in channels, something many users will be familiar with, are a key part of this evolution. It combines the simplicity of chat-like conversations with the structure, durability, and manageability of channels—helping you stay on top of the information that matters most without getting overwhelmed. Let’s take a look. Enhance group collaboration Efficient collaboration moves work forward—and seamless communication is key. Teams need to share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, and resolve challenges quickly. But in today’s fast-paced, always-on-work environment, the workday can feel like a blur. The Work Trend Index calls this the “infinite workday”—where the workday is stretched and attention is constantly under pressure. To help with this challenge, we’re introducing threads in channels—to make collaboration more efficient and focused. With threads, you can reply directly to specific messages, keeping related conversations grouped together without disrupting the main flow. This preserves context and order, making it easier to stay up to date, while allowing for in-depth discussions. You can follow the threads that matter most to you, and when an important update or decision is made, you can send it back to the main conversation, so everyone stays aligned without requiring them to sift through every reply. The Followed Threads view brings all your followed conversations into one interactive list. You can quickly access all your threads, triage and respond—without jumping between channels. And when you're done with a thread, unfollow it to stop receiving future updates. By default, you’ll only follow threads you’ve started, replied to, been mentioned in, or explicitly chosen to follow. ‘Follow’ helps you stay engaged with key conversations, without unnecessary interruptions. The new threads layout complements the existing post layout. While posts are ideal for announcements and broad updates, threads are a better fit with dynamic, scaled collaboration. When creating a new channel, select between threads or posts layout, and don’t worry, this can be changed later without loss of fidelity. By setting up dedicated channels for each project, you can keep stakeholders, files, and updates all in one place—making teamwork more connected, transparent, and efficient. Apps are supported in the threads layout. Bots can start new threads, read messages and respond within a thread, just like a teammate. Channel meetings and ‘meet now’ are supported too, with each meeting getting its own thread to keep content grouped together and easy to find. Threads in channels are now in public preview. Your work isn't limited to just a desktop, so we will bring threads in channels to all devices for seamless productivity, including desktop, mobile, iOS, and Android. Threads in channels is now in public preview. Threads help you keep context while reducing clutter, and emojis help build meaningful connection. In a hybrid workforce, being able to express yourself on Teams helps strengthen team culture. You can now react with multiple reactions per message, enhancing your ability to express a wide range of emotions effectively. For example, react with✅ and 🙏 to convey appreciation and alignment without extra replies. And with custom emojis, introduced last year, your team can reflect its unique identity, from inside jokes to branded visuals, making interactions more personal and fun. Multiple emojis per message is now in public preview. Boost personal productivity Staying productive and meeting deadlines is critical. With the right tools, you can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time driving impact. These new features let you tailor Teams to your needs, helping you make meaningful progress where it counts. You can now trigger workflows with emojis by reacting to messages in a chat or channel—streamlining tasks, reducing manual follow-ups, and speeding up responses. For example, reacting with ❗️can escalate a support issue by creating a helpdesk ticket, while 👀 can forward a message to the right channel. This helps ensure urgent items are addressed quickly and without a manual follow-up. Use emojis to automate DevOps, incident response, team collaboration, and more with the Workflows app. This is now available in public preview. Slash commands in Teams are getting more powerful. With support for multi-step inputs, you can now complete more complex tasks—like searching for a GIF, or jumping directly to a channel using /goto—without ever leaving your chat. These enhancements help you move faster and stay in the flow. Slash commands enhancements are now in public preview. Customize your keyboard shortcuts in Teams to work the way that’s most intuitive to you. Whether you're used to shortcuts from other tools or have your own workflow preferences, you can now set commands that match your habits—helping you work efficiently. To set it, open Keyboard shortcuts from the top bar menu (•••), and enter your own custom commands. Customize your keyboard shortcut is available in public preview. What’s next These latest Teams updates help you spend less time managing work and more time making progress. By cutting distractions, streamlining communication, and automating tasks, we’re helping you reclaim focus in a world where the workday often feels infinite. Teams enables people and agents to work together through secure, collaborative AI — from Copilot integration to agents created with Teams AI library, Copilot Studio, SharePoint, and more. The new threads layout helps bring together the right mix of people and agents for every step of the project, while keeping discussions focused and organized. We recently announced Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent to Agent Communication (A2A) support which allows developers to build more comprehensive agents that can talk to one another. These updates are just the beginning of enhancing human and agent interaction in Teams and there’s much more to come. Ready to try it out? Visit Microsoft adoption to learn more, or head to the Teams app to start using these features in public preview today.
Guest accounts and groupchats
Hello everyone, I recently received a support request regarding adding a person with a guest account to a group chat. Unfortunately, Teams refused to add that account. Copilot explained that this is due to the restrictions guest accounts have when it comes to communicating within the tenant they are invited to. Apparently—and this is what I’d love for you to verify—guests are only able to communicate within channels (e.g., threads in a channel) and in 1:1 chats. After we deleted the guest account, we were able to add that person to the group chat. Are the following informations correct? Guest user in tenant: Added as a guest in your tenant’s Azure Active Directory Access: Teams channels, files, meetings Restriction: No regular group chats outside of Teams channels External user (federation): Remains in their own tenant, connected to yours through federation Access: Chats and calls like regular Teams users Advantage: Can be added to regular group chats Thank you for your help. Best HishamTab is not visible for single member in shared channel
Hello everyone, Another day, another M365 mystery. I have a client who added a website tab to a shared channel that is linked to a Planner plan. Technically, this “plan” isn’t a standard plan, as it was created via a Loop component in the channel conversation. Very confusing, I know. So far, so good—this tab is visible to all members of the shared channel except one person. I’ve checked, and everyone has the same licenses. Any ideas on how to solve this mystery? Best regards, Hisham
[Adaptive Card] Issue with rendering images and ToggleVisibility
I am using a simple accordion style adaptive card with a collapsible section: { "type": "AdaptiveCard", "$schema": "https://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json", "version": "1.5", "body": [ { "type": "Container", "items": [ { "type": "ColumnSet", "columns": [ { "type": "Column", "items": [ { "type": "TextBlock", "text": "Title", "wrap": true, "size": "Medium" } ], "width": "stretch" }, { "type": "Column", "id": "chevronDown", "spacing": "Small", "verticalContentAlignment": "Center", "items": [ { "type": "Image", "url": "https://adaptivecards.io/content/down.png", "width": "20px", "altText": "collapsed" } ], "width": "auto" }, { "type": "Column", "id": "chevronUp", "spacing": "Small", "verticalContentAlignment": "Center", "items": [ { "type": "Image", "url": "https://adaptivecards.io/content/up.png", "width": "20px", "altText": "expanded" } ], "width": "auto", "isVisible": false } ], "selectAction": { "type": "Action.ToggleVisibility", "targetElements": [ "cardContent", "chevronUp", "chevronDown" ] } }, { "type": "Container", "id": "cardContent", "isVisible": false, "items": [ { "type": "Container", "items": [ { "type": "TextBlock", "text": "Text" } ] } ] } ], "separator": true, "spacing": "Medium" } ] } On the initial load, the image (down arrow) gets rendered properly. If I click on it, the collapsed section opens (and the down arrow gets hidden and replaced by the up arrow). However, if I collapse the accordion again, the following happens: And it stays like this until I restart the Teams client. Looking at the devtools network tab for the web client the following behavior can be observed: During the initial load (1) the down.png gets fetched and stored in memory. You can also see the result on the right. If I extend the component (2), the up.png gets fetched and stored in memory. If I then collapse the section again (3), the call to memory for the down arrow fails with GET blob:https://teams.microsoft.com/51e89b2e-7da4-4c80-bf98-a6ee4d257052 net::ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND It happens in both the standalone client and the web version. Also for multiple users (so it is not just some caching issue on my side). It seems to me that toggling the visibility somehow removes the images from memory. But it only happens for images that are initially visible (it doesn't happen for the up arrow in my case).
Microsoft Teams Bot OAuth login shows blank screen and closes without signing in
I’m building a Microsoft Teams bot using Azure AD OAuth (SSO) with Bot Framework. When I click Sign in, the OAuth popup in Teams shows a blank screen for a moment, then closes automatically without signing me in. What I’ve Done Added redirect URI in Azure App Registration: https://token.botframework.com/.auth/web/redirect Enabled Access tokens and ID tokens in App Registration → Authentication. Configured OAuth connection in Bot Channels Registration (ConnectionName matches my bot code). Verified client ID, client secret, and tenant ID are correct. Code bot.js require("dotenv").config(); const { TeamsActivityHandler } = require("botbuilder"); const { Client } = require("@microsoft/microsoft-graph-client"); const { DialogSet, DialogTurnStatus, OAuthPrompt, WaterfallDialog } = require("botbuilder-dialogs"); require("isomorphic-fetch"); const OAUTH_PROMPT = "OAuthPrompt"; const MAIN_DIALOG = "MainDialog"; class BotActivityHandler extends TeamsActivityHandler { constructor(conversationState, userState) { super(); this.conversationState = conversationState; this.userState = userState; this.dialogState = this.conversationState.createProperty("DialogState"); this.dialogs = new DialogSet(this.dialogState); // OAuthPrompt for Teams SSO this.dialogs.add( new OAuthPrompt(OAUTH_PROMPT, { connectionName: process.env.CONNECTION_NAME, text: "Please sign in to continue", title: "Sign In", timeout: 300000, }) ); this.dialogs.add( new WaterfallDialog(MAIN_DIALOG, [ this.promptStep.bind(this), this.handleFileStep.bind(this), ]) ); this.onMessage(async (context, next) => { const text = (context.activity.text || "").trim().toLowerCase(); const dialogCtx = await this.dialogs.createContext(context); if (text.startsWith("/")) { // ...handle commands... } else { const results = await dialogCtx.continueDialog(); if (results.status === DialogTurnStatus.empty) { if (context.activity.attachments?.length > 0) { await dialogCtx.beginDialog(MAIN_DIALOG, { file: context.activity.attachments[0], }); } else { await context.sendActivity("Upload a file or type /help."); } } } await next(); }); } async promptStep(stepContext) { return await stepContext.beginDialog(OAUTH_PROMPT); } async handleFileStep(stepContext) { const tokenResponse = stepContext.result; if (!tokenResponse?.token) { await stepContext.context.sendActivity("Please sign in to access files."); return await stepContext.endDialog(); } const token = tokenResponse.token; // Use token with Microsoft Graph API // ... return await stepContext.endDialog(); } } module.exports.BotActivityHandler = BotActivityHandler; Problem OAuth popup appears, then closes without completing login. No token is returned to the bot. Questions Why does the OAuth popup in Teams close immediately without signing in? Where can I see detailed error logs for OAuth failures? Azure AD sign-in logs? Application Insights (do I need to configure Instrumentation Key in Bot Service)? Environment Bot Framework v4 (Node.js) Azure Bot Service Microsoft Teams channel Azure AD v2 OAuthTeams pulls up main window after switching application windows during a meeting
I hope I can explain this properly, please let me know if it isn't clear. OS: macOS Sonoma Teams version: 24277.3502.3161.3007 When I am in a Teams call, I will often need to temporarily switch windows to Chrome or another application. When I tab back to the Teams call, the Main Teams window will pop up on top of the call, which requires me to minimize it in order to view the call window. I haven't been able to find a setting that addresses this specifically. Simplified steps: Join a Teams call from the the primary Teams window or Outlook calendar Switch applications to something else - Slack, Chrome, etc. Click the Teams icon in the dock The Teams call will take focus The Teams main window automatically pops up overlays the call, hiding it Thanks in advance for your help and please let me know if there is anything I can clarify.Can't publish app to my org
I'm trying to publish my app to my org without success, don't know how to proceed. I've tried to publish from teams and from dev.teams portal. I already did the app validation but couldn't resolve the issue. When I'm trying to do that from Teams App I get the error: This app cannot be found. When I'm trying to do it from https://dev.teams.microsoft.com/ I'm get the error Failed to submit this app, reviewing the request I notice the publishing request got the following response: { "error": { "code": "BadRequest", "message": "BadRequest", "innerError": { "code": "BadRequest", "date": "2025-01-25T14:45:20", "request-id": "582ba....", "client-request-id": "582ba415...." } } }
