Just a quick overview of the Teams interface. Don’t worry too much about the terms and lingo, you’ll pick it up quickly.
- App bar: Here you can navigate to the various sections in Teams. From the top, you’ll see the following icons:
- Activity is where you’ll find mentions, replies, and other notifications.
- Chat is where you’ll see your recent one-on-one or group chats and your Contacts list.
- Teams displays all the Teams you are a member of.
- Meetings is synched with your Outlook calendar and displays all your upcoming meetings.
- Files aggregates all the files from all the Teams you are a member of. It is also where you access your personal OneDrive for Business storage.
- […] includes links to apps that are tied to Teams and the channels within Teams.
- Store takes you to apps and services that can be integrated into Teams.
- Feedback takes you to the Microsoft Teams user voice page where you can leave feedback about the service.
- Teams section: Above, the Teams icon is selected in the App bar, so the list of the teams we are members of are displayed here.
- Channel: A dedicated section within a Team to organize conversations and tasks into specific topics or projects.
- Join or Create a Team button: Clicking this button takes you through the process of creating or joining a team. This button is only visible when the Teams icon is selected in the App bar.
- New Chat button: Clicking this button selects the Chat icon in the App bar and allows you to start a new chat with an individual or a group.
- Command bar: This bar at the top is used to query apps or perform a search in Teams.
- Tabs: Switch between different Teams pages with these tabs. Conversations and Files are automatically included; the + sign tab allows you to add shortcuts to content in Teams.
- Channel Conversations: This section displays all the conversations in the selected channel. Chats in Channel Conversations are persistent, so if you’ve been away, it’s easy to scroll through to get caught up when you get back. Chats can include visual indicators such as the @mention, which indicates that the chat specifically mentions a user, or a red bang to indicate high importance. Take note that chats are open by design so everyone in the team has visibility to the conversation to help speed up the decision-making process when needed.
- Compose box: This is where you can type a message to start a conversation. You can send a quick chat or expand the Compose box to access rich formatting tools.
- Send icon: When you’re ready to share your chat, click the Send icon to post your chat to the team.