What are organisation-wide Teams in Teams?

Organisation-wide teams provide an automatic way for everyone in a small to medium-sized organisation (up to 5,000 users) to be a part of a single team for collaboration and notifications.

With org-wide teams, an organisation can easily have a (well actually up to 5) public teams that pulls in every user in the organisation and keeps the membership up-to-date with Active Directory as users join and leave the organisation (assuming your AD is well managed of course).

As your organisation’s directory is updated to include new active users, or if users no longer work at your company and their Teams license is disabled, changes are automatically synced and the users are added or removed from the team.

Team members can’t leave an org-wide team.

As a team owner, you can manually add or remove users if needed.

Best practices for organisation-wide teams

To get the most benefit out of using an org-wide team, there’s some best practice Microsoft has published based on its research with customers:

  • Allow only team owners to post to the General channel, to reduce channel “noise.”
  • Turn off @team and @[team name] mentions to prevent overloading the entire organisation.
  • Automatically mark important channels as favorites to ensure that everyone in your organization engages in specific conversations.
  • Set up channel moderation so that moderators can control who can start a new post in a channel as well. As who can reply..You may want it as an annoucment only channel for example.
  • Remove accounts that might not belong. Such as test accounts etc.

I also discovered you can convert an existing Team to a Org-wide team if you want to.. Again this is an admin required task.

Private Channels in org-wide Teams?

There is of course Private Channels also coming very shortly to Teams which can also be used to segregate aspects of your org-wide Team to, well, less than all the organisation… I’d probably suggest not using this function inside these kind of Teams (assuming it’s permitted).

https://robquickenden.blog/private-channels-for-teams-are-almost-here

Thanks for Reading.

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