Teams Chat or Channel Choice

There’s lots of different ways to communicate with your colleagues in Teams.  Two main ones are chats and channels.  So what’s the difference?

Channels are available to every one in your team.  One convenient feature is the ability to separate and discuss different ideas, called threads, like this:

 Image source medium.com

So, people that want to contribute to this idea but not that one can pick and choose which parts of the group conversation to be involved in.  It’s also easy to go back to an idea and make it a current topic.

Chat is a great way to communicate with one or a few people.  It’s a quick and easy way to communicate with people near and far.  Of course, you can create a group chat with your team.  The issue there is

Conversations

Turn

Into

One

Long

Stream

Of

Messages, and it’s easy to miss ideas, and hard to go back to a comment and catch up.  For larger group conversations, it’s a Good Idea ™ to use the power of threads in Channels to organise your teams’ thoughts.