Working Remotely with Teams

Sending Messages

Channels are spaces you can use to organize conversations, content, and people in Teams.

When you want to send a message to members of your Team at once, you will use a Team channel.

There are a few ways you can send messages in Teams:

• Use @ mentions to get the attention of your Team members
• Post a message in a channel
• Post a message in multiple channels at the same time
• Make an announcement to your Team
• Send an email to a Team channel
• Share information from Outlook

Here's a tutorial to walk you through creating and formatting messages in Teams. 

Read more about working with channels in Teams. 

Schedule Meetings

• You can schedule a meeting from a chat using the schedule now button  to quickly add those you're chatting with. 
• If you'd like to invite your Team to a meeting, use open a channel and click the meet now video icon 
• The Calendar tab  in Teams can be used to schedule meetings with your Team and guests. Click the calendar tab on the left-hand navigation menu to get started. 

• Outlook has a Teams plug-in  you can use to schedule Teams meeting.  . 

Read more on meetings in Teams. 

Documents

Each Team has a document library to create, upload, manage and store documents in. You can get to your document library using the Files tab at the top of a Team channel. 

Files found here can be edited by members of your Team within the application. Changes will be synced to your group document library for easy co-authoring and edits. 

Read more on collaborating on files in Teams. 

Take Notes Together with OneNote

Each Team is given a OneNote notebook for collaboration with three spaces:

• Collaboration Space – A notebook for all staff members and the staff leader in the group to share, organize, and collaborate.

• Content Library – A notebook for a staff leader to share course materials with staff members. A staff leader can add and edit its materials, but for staff members, the notebook is read-only.

• Staff Member Notebooks – Private notebooks that are shared between each staff leader and their individual staff members. Staff leader can access these notebooks at any time, but staff members cannot see other staff members’ notebooks.

Read more on using OneNote and Teams together. 

Manage Tasks with Planner

Microsoft Planner is a task management software making it easy for your Team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, and chat about what you're working on to get updates.

This is the fourth panel of the basic tab example. This is the fourth panel of the basic tab example. 

Plans must be associated with an existing Microsoft Team. Open Microsoft Teams and the channel you want to add a Planner tab to Click Add a Tab + at the top and select Planner. 

Read more on task management with Planner in Teams. 

Guests and Teams

Team owners can add or invite any email address (with the exception of UTMail addresses) to their Team to participate as a guest with full access to team chats, meetings and files. 

Note: UTMail addresses (@utexas.edu) cannot be used or invited as guest accounts in Teams.

Guests will need to use their personal email address to login. If the guest doesn’t yet have a Microsoft Account associated with their email address, they will be directed to create one for free.

Private Channels

Create areas for focused collaboration with certain members of your Team using private channels. 

Private channels can only been seen by its members and owners.  

Read more about when and how to create private channels.