Using Teams for shared files and collaboration

Designing your Teams groups

If your project or team doesn't already have a Teams Group set up, have a read of this guide to work out how best to design it: Getting started with Teams Groups for collaboration.

Video guides

We did a training session outlining some of the key functionality:

🖵 Watch the training (41 mins)

We've produced a video guide that explains using Teams and groups within them.

🖵 Watch the video guide (18 minutes)

UCL provides the following video guide, which can be used in conjunction:

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/aab5343a-8913-4def-9cdc-84d6d5955bd5

Setting up a team

1. Create a team - follow https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-team-from-scratch-174adf5f-846b-4780-b765-de1a0a737e2b?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
   • For UCL staff, Teams will present some options like "Class" based on our academic subscription to Teams. We recommend selecting the "Other" as this is the most generic option and enables you to customise it if needed.
2. Add your collaborators - follow https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-members-to-a-team-in-teams-aff2249d-b456-4bc3-81e7-52327b6b38e9

Make sure to have at least one back-up "owner" in the group, so that others have access when you are on leave or when you leave the organisation. 

Uploading files

In the Team, go to the Files tab, and either:

1. Click ‘Upload’ and select the files or folders; or
2. Drag and drop files onto it

Or, if you set up syncing with your laptop (described below), you can just use Windows Explorer to manage the files.

Accessing / syncing files

Via the Teams app

1. Select Teams in the left hand bar in Teams
2. Find your Team
3. Go to the Files tab

On your laptop

To set up syncing with your laptop (only need to do once!):

1. Make sure you have OneDrive installed - if you're on a UCL laptop or Windows 10, you will already.
2. Select Teams in the left hand bar in Teams
3. Find your Team
4. Go to the Files tab
5. Click 'Open in SharePoint' at the top menu
6. In SharePoint, click 'Sync': 
7. Click 'Sync Now'

To access the files:

1. Open Windows File Explorer
2. Find the Team folder under "University College London" in the left hand side

I can see too many Teams in my list! 

You can always leave a Team if it is no longer relevant, or click the menu next to its name and ‘Hide’ it.  

If there are channels you use a lot, you can also click the menu next to its name and click ‘Pin’ to keep it at the top. 

If you need to find a team quickly, search it by name in the search bar up the top.  

If the Teams group is no longer relevant for anyone and there’s nothing that needs long term archiving, suggest to the Owner that it be deleted. 

There’s a lot of noise in the chat for a channel... 

You can always create new channels if one channel is being overwhelmed by off-topic conversation.  

If you like, you can also restrict who can post to a channel’s chat – if you click the menu dots next to the channel name and click ‘Manage channel’, you can either allow everyone, allow everyone but with a stern warning about who it will notify, or restrict it only to owners of the Team Group (e.g. managers).