Getting started with Teams Groups for collaboration

Note: this guide is about starting out with a new Teams Group and how to design your group structure. If you want guides on how to do specific things with Teams, have a look at Using Teams for shared files and collaboration as well.

Historically at UCL, staff store shared files in folders on the S:/ drive, and must log in to a UCL PC or otherwise connect to that network drive to access them.

Teams groups allow you to store your files in the cloud, accessible from any browser or device. You can also sync any files to your laptop so you can manage them much like you did on the shared drive.

Teams Groups offer a lot of advantages over the S:/drive, and in some cases may be better than Slack if you're doing a lot of work collaborating on files. Neither the S:/ drive or Slack are going anywhere right now, but we're encouraging people to try to use Teams Groups to make the most of the integrated functionality of Microsoft 365.

Why move from S:/ drive to Teams Groups?

There’s a real advantage to having files accessible and shareable online, for collaboration. With Teams Groups, you also get chat and calendars associated with your group or channel, which makes it even easier to collaborate on work. 

A key thing is control - you can control who can access what yourself, without needing to go through Systems or ISD. 

• Access controls: Teams allows you to manage who has access yourself, rather than having to request access via SU.Systems and ISD (which can take a few days). You can also provide specific custom access to individual files and folders within your group, whereas access to shared drive folders can only be controlled at the top level (e.g. SU_Sports).
• Infinite: You can create a Team for any project, team or area, and as many as you like, so you can set up access to specific files for specific groups of people.
• Device friendly: Teams can be accessed from any browser or device, without needing to be connected to the AnyConnect VPN. This includes mobile devices, which cannot use the shared drive.
• Live collaboration: You can collaborate live online when editing files in a Teams group, via a browser or desktop Office. On the shared drive, you may have file editing conflicts as you cannot both have the document open for editing.
• Additional functionality: You also get the other Teams functionality for each Team group, including chat, shared calendars, and other Teams apps like:
  • Microsoft Planner (kanban boards and tasks integration)
  • Whiteboard (collaborate visually)
  • Asana
  • Trello

Why move from Slack to Teams Groups? 

Slack is largely a chat platform. Teams Groups incorporate chat, but also file management and other collaboration apps. With Teams, this is all integrated into the same platform you use as part of Microsoft 365 (Office), your e-mail, calendar and video meetings. Once you get used to it, it offers a lot of interconnected functionality over Slack.  

Where do we begin? 

Take a look at how your team works using the S:/ drive and Slack, especially regarding file management.

Read the guidance below and start thinking about what Teams group(s) you need, and how you might set up the channels within them. Then, you can think about folder structure and other apps you might want.  

A big decider in a lot of things will be access – who should be able to access what within your team. There are several ways of managing this per channel, per folder, and even per file – all explained below. 

It might be worth designing what you think you’ll need, in terms of groups and channels, and chatting with Systems to see if there are any solutions for any issues or queries you have.  

What Teams groups do I need for my department? 

We’d suggest starting with one group – e.g. if you are the Beekeeping department, just create ‘SU Beekeeping’ as a Teams group.  

The only time you’d want to create more than one Teams Group is if you have complex access requirements within your department and don’t want to manage them using private channels or folder access (see below). This would be rare! 

How do we organise our work within a group?

Within the group, you can have different “channels”. These are little sub-groups of your team.  

Each channel has its own chat, files folder and can have its own calendar. You can also add other apps to each channel. (Think of it like Slack, with the different chat channels, but with much more functionality!). 

For instance, for the Union Beekeeping department, we might have: 

• Hive management 

• Honey quality assurance 

• Research 

In each area, we want to have a separate conversation, set of files, and possibly a calendar. 

Most channels would be available to your whole team, so you can just create them as “Standard” channels. This means everyone in the Teams group can see and participate in everything in that channel. 

I want to restrict access for some things to certain people in my team 

There are two options: set up a Private channel, and specify exactly who can access, or if it’s just for files you can manage it per folder. 

However, we may also have sensitive information that we don’t want everyone in the team to see. This is especially true if we have student staff, who may not be allowed to see information e.g. about other students. So, we could create a “Private” channel. (Note that currently private channels cannot have channel calendars or planners associated with them. This may change later in 2023 as Microsoft updates Teams). 

If you don’t want to set a channel as Private, but do want to restrict access to some files, you can also modify the access per-folder within a channel. Click the three dots next to the folder in the Files tab, click “Manage access”, and you can change the setting next to “SU Beekeeping Visitors” and “SU Beekeeping Members” to “Stop sharing”. This means even though the channel is shared, that folder isn’t! You can then add individual people in that “Manage Access” dialog to grant them access.

Using the tools

For how to actually do specific things in Teams, read Using Teams for shared files and collaboration