Teams Tips #1 – Keeping the conversation in context

Hello everyone,

I recently started looking into Teams as we push to work with it more and more to increase our collaborative team work.

As a result, I keep finding these little tips I share with my team to try and help them make better use of this tool and I figured I might as well share them here.

so this will be the first in a series of tips I will share over time (hopefully weekly!).

And the first one – keeping the conversation in context:

Often when talking about Teams you may encounter the concept of “Conversations”.

Think of a conversation as its own thread – a new one is created every time you post a new message using the bottom chat box (Start a new conversation):

TeamsTips01-1

If you want to reply to someone who mentioned you or alternatively, have something to contribute to an ongoing conversation – use the reply option.

This way it stays in the context of the conversation.

TeamsTips01-2

You’re probably asking yourself – why is this important, well.. picture a very active channel where many topics are discussed (like a forum), you want your reply to appear in the right thread as otherwise no one will be able to associate it with the rest of the conversation.

Also, If you add a comment, it bumps the thread, replying outside of it may result in losing something that may have been important.

To finish off, here are some example for conversations someone might have:

  • Discussion around an open task or issue
  • Discussion around an email that was sent to the channel (remember, every email automatically starts a new conversation)
  • Meetings:

TeamsTips01-3

When scheduling a meeting, it also creates a conversation and it records things that happened during the meeting.

You can use the conversation for follow ups and other post-meeting discussions.

  • Much more!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *