Using Teams, Chat, and Mentions

Quick reference

• 00:04 Teams can help you collaborate with other people and help them collaborate with you.
• 00:08 We'll learn about communicating effectively using posts in Teams.
• 00:12 And channels can be standard, channels available to everybody as you see here, or
• 00:16 they can be private channels available to only those who are invited.
• 00:22 When you select the channel, you'll see on the Posts tab,
• 00:25 the conversations that have happened in the channel.
• 00:27 This is very important as when new people are added to a team,
• 00:31 they can catch up on the conversations that have happened
• 00:33 without having to be briefed by somebody else.
• 00:36 This includes documents that have been posted as well as meetings
• 00:39 that have been posted.
• 00:40 These meetings by the way can be linked to recordings of the meetings,
• 00:43 which you can then review.
• 00:46 Each channel has its own conversation area.
• 00:49 So this means that conversations are scoped to a channel.
• 00:54 When you post into a channel, not everyone in the entire team will see it,
• 00:58 just the people who were in the channel conversation.
• 01:01 In this channel, you can save several conversations.
• 01:04 And you can hit Reply to any one of them by clicking on the Reply button, and
• 01:08 then you can reply back to Isaiah in this case.
• 01:11 To see an entire conversation, just click on the replies and
• 01:14 it will expand the thread.
• 01:16 To start a new conversation, go to the bottom of the screen where it says
• 01:20 to Start a new conversation, and then you can simply type what you wish.
• 01:27 And if you make a typo, no worries, you can simply click
• 01:33 on the ellipses and then click Edit to edit your post.
• 01:41 In addition, there are other things that you may want to do such as delete
• 01:45 the post or share it in Outlook.
• 01:48 It's easy to attach a file to a conversation
• 01:51 by simply clicking the paperclip icon and then indicate where you
• 01:54 want to source your file from either OneDrive or another team or channel.
• 01:59 And if you have, for example, box or
• 02:01 Dropbox that will show up here too potentially,
• 02:04 you can upload from your computer, and the document will be uploaded into Teams.
• 02:11 And we'll make a comment about the document so
• 02:13 people know what it is, click Enter and post the document with the comment.
• 02:18 In addition to attachments, you can add gifts to your responses,
• 02:21 you can add stickers as well.
• 02:23 Stickers can be a lot of fun because you can add your own comments to them and
• 02:27 customize the text to be whatever you like.
• 02:30 So we'll change this to Let's Go!
• 02:32 Click Done and it'll post to the team chat.
• 02:34 You can also say meet now to start ad hoc meeting in real time with your team
• 02:38 members.
• 02:40 And there are other choices here as well to explore.
• 02:43 By clicking on the A icon, you can format your text so
• 02:46 that you could improve your posts attractiveness and readability.
• 02:51 So we'll type this as the agenda,
• 02:53 which will then be highlighted in the post whenever it's visible to the team.
• 02:58 Next, we'll just type in some placeholder content and we'll click bullets here and
• 03:02 we'll post this.
• 03:05 Now, you can see a headline here along with formatted text.
• 03:09 This can significantly improve readability and long lists.
• 03:12 So you can compare this, for example,
• 03:14 to here where a title has been used or subject has been used in these.
• 03:19 And as you can tell the subjects just kind of pop.
• 03:22 When you're posting information to a conversation and
• 03:25 you mentioned somebody by name, you can use an @Mentions in order to cause them to
• 03:30 be alerted to the fact that they were mentioned in a team conversation.
• 03:34 This is a very powerful way to ensure that the relevant people to a conversation
• 03:38 are notified that something is happening that deserves their attention.
• 03:42 To use @Mentions, you begin with an @ sign.
• 03:45 And this brings up a list of everybody that's available.
• 03:48 And now, we begin to type it.
• 03:49 We can say @Isaiah, and by simply typing I-S it filters down to Isaiah,
• 03:54 click on his name and post a message that let's talk right away.
• 04:00 Now, I've switched into a view or you can see Megan on the left and
• 04:04 Isaiah on the right so that you can see how this works in real time.
• 04:08 And so Megan will simply use the @Mentions for Isaiah and press Enter.
• 04:12 Or on the right, you can see that in real time, Isaiah gets a post that says,
• 04:17 hey dude, you've been mentioned, you might want to check that out.
• 04:21 So he can either click on this which will then launch into conversation and
• 04:25 can see immediately that this is the message and
• 04:28 here this little @ sign means you are mentioned.
• 04:31 Now, Isaiah can return the favor.
• 04:34 But in this case, he's going to respond by saying, let's talk to the whole team.
• 04:38 So he'll say @channel, everybody that is subscribed to the legal and
• 04:44 compliance channel notifications will get this notice and
• 04:50 say, team meeting announcement.
• 04:53 And when he clicks this,
• 04:54 everybody who's subscribed to the channel will get a notification.
• 04:58 And now you can see Megan sees her notification that there's something she
• 05:02 needs to pay attention to.
• 05:04 And she can click on this again and
• 05:05 see the response here, not only to just Megan, but to everybody in the channel.
• 05:11 In order to see channel notifications,
• 05:14 you generally need to be subscribed to the channel notifications.
• 05:17 Which you can do by clicking the dot dot dot, the ellipses,
• 05:20 and select that you wish to receive channel notifications.
• 05:25 So as a best practice for people who are important to a channel conversation,
• 05:29 they should select to receive channel notifications.
• 05:32 And in that way when you do what Isaiah just did,
• 05:35 the channel notification will pop up for all those people.
• 05:39 While you're here, if this channel is important to you, you may choose
• 05:42 to pin the channel to the top of your list so that it will always be visible to you.
• 05:47 And this way as lists get longer because of teams and channels get added to
• 05:51 the system, they can flow out a view and you want important ones to pop to the top.
• 05:55 So you can do that by using pin.
• 05:58 So let's take a moment and review.
• 06:00 Channels in Teams can be either public or private.
• 06:03 And each channel has its own chat activity.
• 06:06 A journal of all that activity can be reviewed by team members at any time.
• 06:11 You can add files, meeting requests, you can even post GIFs or stickers to a post.
• 06:17 It's a good practice to format posts so that they have better readability.
• 06:20 You can use @Mentions in a post to ensure that the people that you're talking with
• 06:25 are alerted on either their mobile devices or their computers.
• 06:29 In addition, you can alert the entire channel to important information.
• 06:33 When you have a channel that you really want to pay attention to,
• 06:36 subscribe to the channel to ensure that you get all the notifications.
• 06:39 And you can of course, pin that channel to the top of your list so it's easy to find.
• 06:45 So using chat in Teams is a great way to communicate with your channel, but
• 06:49 what if you want to do a one on one conversation?
• 06:51 Let's talk about that next.

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