Have you tried a staff-wide Team in Microsoft Teams?

Technology Microsoft
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We have around 140 staff that regularly use computers, and about 20 that only use email on their phones or a shared computer.

Many teams around campus are using Microsoft Teams, and most of them love it.

I was curious if any of you have a Microsoft Team that the entire staff are a part of, mainly as a replacement for bulk staff-wide email. Right now staff send emails with photos of office furniture and supplies they need to get rid of, or of items they’ve found and need to find the owner of. I’m thinking it would be nice to move all of that off of email and in to chat so people who want to ignore it can, but people who don’t want to miss out can follow it.

We could also use it for staff-wide shared files.

I fear if I do this, it will wind up being a time-suck for people, so I’m not sold just yet. I don’t want to introduce distractions.

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Chris we use it to communicate staff wide. We have a “Dream Team” team in Microsoft Teams that all the staff are part of.

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We have a staff wide team but my struggle is getting people to use it. They are having trouble letting go of email as the default communication tool.

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Try identifying teams that are more keen to use MS Teams and start with them first. Once the first wave of adoption is successful then try convincing more to join through the positive benefits experienced by the first teams. Best if the staff themselves promote it to their own project/work teams and watch it organically spread. It will usually take some effort to get buy in unless the senior management mandates it. Took me 2 years to spread Sharepoint, 1 year for calendaring and 1 year for corporate instant messaging… :slight_smile:

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We have about 300 staff and use an All-Staff team with a Finance, HR, IT, Communications, and Prayer/Praise channels and we try and try to make it the default communication method for Churchwide communications but so many are white-knuckling email and just wont let go.

We even tried disabling our all-staff email distribution but there was some serious pushback on that one so we scratched that idea.

We’ve had some wins with doing things like:

  • Employee Handbook Tab in HR Channel
  • Payroll / Benefits links in tabs in HR Channel
  • Tax Exempt form in a Tab in the Finance Channel
  • Tabs for Nexonia / Intacct for Finance Channel
  • IT Helpdesk Tab
  • PowerPoint & Document templates and weekend promo graphics in the files section of our communication department
  • SharePoint news posts in the General Feed
  • All-Staff video recordings in a Microsoft Stream tab, etc.
  • Incorporating a Master Calendar that is associated with that Team / O365 Group
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That’s terrific!

Out of curiosity, am I correct in assuming that anyone on staff could delete or change the Employee Handbook in the HR channel? Or are there ways to lock down permissions on a per-channel basis?

That’s been my only hesitation. I realize there’s an audit trail and easy recovery, but I’m sure there will be times things accidentally get modified or deleted and we don’t notice until after the time has expired.

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We can set permissions per file / folder. By default members have read / write but you can ‘fix’ that :wink: I also found a way where if you want to use the O365 Group calendar to only allow owners to create / edit appointments while the members have read only access.

Here’s the reference link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/users-and-groups/set-unifiedgroup?view=exchange-ps

But here’s the instructions I made for our internal KB:

  1. Powershell to Office 365
  2. Type: Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity groupidentity@kensingtonchurch.onmicrosoft.com -CalendarMemberReadOnly ( Identity Example: allstaff@kensingtonchurch.onmicrosoft.com )
  3. To check to see if it worked type:
    Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity allstaff@kensingtonchurch.onmicrosoft.com -IncludeAllProperties | For mat-List Calendar

of course replace kensingtonchurch with your O365 Tenant name.

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By creating a company-wide team, you can communicate with all of your employees, store company files, and schedule meetings.

  1. In Microsoft Teams, choose Join or create a team > Create team .
  2. In the Create your team box, enter a name and description for your team.
  3. Under Privacy , choose Org-wide . (If you don’t see this option, it’s because you need to be an administrator to change this setting.) Choose Next .
  4. In Teams, a the bottom of the page, type a welcome message to your team members, and then choose Send Send button .When your employees open this team, they’ll see your message and the latest conversations. Try any of the following:
  • Use the Files tab to view and share company files. To add a document for everyone to see, just drag and drop it from its location on your computer onto the Files page.
  • Use the Wiki tab for notes, or to share company knowledge.
  • Click the plus (+) sign to add more apps to the team, such as OneNote, Planner, or Adobe products.
  • Use the options in the left navigation to start a chat, make a call, or schedule or attend a meeting.
    I hope this information on MS Teams is helpful.
    Regards,
    Lewis