Microsoft Teams allows individual teams to self-organize and collaborate across business scenarios: 

  • Teams are collections 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 10,000 members). 
  • Channels are dedicated sections within a team to keep conversations organized by specific topics, projects, disciplines—whatever works for your team. Files that you share in a channel (on the Files tab) are stored in SharePoint. To learn more, read Overview of Teams and SharePoint integration.  
    • Channels are places where conversations happen and where the work actually gets done. Channels can be open to all team members (standard channels), selected team members (private channels), or selected people both inside and outside the team (shared channels). 
    • Channels are most valuable when extended with apps that include tabs, connectors, and bots that increase their value to the members of the team. 

Team owners can also create a team based on an existing Microsoft 365 group. Any changes made to the group membership will be synced with Teams automatically. 

Team roles 

There are two main roles in Teams: 

  • 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 members - The people who the owners invite to join their team. 

In addition, if moderation is set up, team owners and members can have moderator capabilities for a channel. Moderators can start new posts in the channel and control whether team members can reply to existing channel messages. Team owners can assign moderators within a channel. (Team owners have moderator capabilities by default.) Moderators within a channel can add or remove other moderators within that channel. 

  

Team settings 

Team owners can manage team-wide settings directly in Teams. Settings include the ability to add a team picture, set permissions across team members for creating standard, private, and shared channels, adding tabs and connectors, @mentioning the entire team or channel, and the usage of GIFs, stickers, and memes.