Teams - Glossary

Team

A Team is a collection of people, content, and tools surrounding different projects and outcomes within an organization.

Teams can be created to be private to only invited users.
Teams can also be created to be public and open and anyone within the organization can join (up to 5000 members).

A team is designed to bring together a group of people who work closely to get things done. Teams can be dynamic for project-based work (for example, launching a product, creating a digital war room), as well as ongoing, to reflect the internal structure of your organization (for example, departments and office locations). Conversations, files and notes across team channels are only visible to members of the team.

Owner

The person who creates the team. Team owners can make any member of their team a co-owner when they invite them to the team or at any point after they’ve joined the team. Having multiple team owners lets you share the responsibilities of managing settings and membership, including invitations. Team owners can manage team-wide settings directly in Microsoft Teams. Settings include the ability to add a team picture, set permissions across team members for creating standard and private channels, adding tabs and connectors, @mentioning the entire team or channel, and the usage of GIFs, stickers, and memes.

Member

The people who the owners invite to join their team, they can be regular members from within your organisation or guests.

Guest

A team owner in Microsoft Teams can add and manage guests in their teams via the web or desktop. Anyone with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook, Gmail, or others, can participate as a guest in Teams, with full access to team chats, meetings, and files. Only people who are outside of your organization, such as partners or consultants, can be added as guests. People from within your organization can join as regular team members.

Channel

Within a team, members can set up channels. Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines etc. Standard channels are for conversations that everyone in a team can participate in.

Private Channel

Channels can be open to all team members or, if you need a more select audience, they can be private. Private Channels limit communication to a subset of people in a team.

Chat

Direct messages allow users to send private messages to a specific user rather than a group of people.

Tabs

Tabs are found at the top of the Team or Channel window. Owners and Members (if allowed by Owners) are able to add additional applications as a tab such as Word or Planner: