Channels
Channels are where we communicate in groups around a particular topic, similar to Slack. The one difference is in Slack you can pick and choose who on your Team belongs to a Channel. In Teams, every member of the “Team” is a member of every Channel and everything you say is public to the whole team. However to manage what you see and get alerts about, you use Favorite and Follow.
Favorite: Favoriting a channel means that it will show up on your Channel list. IF you don’t favorite a channel, it will get collapsed into a “see more channels” button.
Our main channels (General, Meeting Notes and Random) have all automatically been set as a favorite for all Team members.
Our two other channels (Editorial and Website) are not automatically favorited for everyone so if you belong to this channel (and you know who you are) you should click on the star next to the channel name.
For the purposes of our trial, we will leave the other channels that are old or not used often in Slack and evaluate at the end of our Trial if we need other channels.
Follow: Following a channel means you want to get alerted about new content. Note that you cannot Follow a channel if you haven’t selected it as a favorite.
If you are a member of this channel and would be expected to contribute to any conversation, you should click on the 3 dots next to the channel name and select “Follow this Channel”.
For our purposes, every channel you have favorited should be followed, with the exception of Random. It’s up to you if you’d like to see when there are new messages for Random.
We will go over customizing your Alerts later.
Channels have Tabs that you can add to make the channel more dynamic. For instance on our General Channel, I added a couple frequently used links to our Wiki page. But there are other apps that could be good to use like Trello or Hootsuite on other channels.
Chat
Chat is the Direct Messages Function in Slack. This is where you can message directly with one person or with a group of people and the messages are private. Chat has a whole lot of features that you can take advantage of like video conferencing or sharing a screen.
You can chat with anyone in the organization. Which is great, but also means that your contacts and direct message list can get messy. So here are a few tips to organize that.
Once you’ve started a conversation, you can “pin” that conversation for easy access. Hover over the chat and click the 3 dots and select Pin so it goes to the top of your Recent list.
If you have more than one person in a chat, name that group by clicking on the pencil next to all of the names in the chat.