Blog - Rencore

Discover the new Chat and Channel experience in Microsoft Teams

Written by Rene Vlieger | Dec 17, 2024 3:04:11 PM

Microsoft Teams continues to evolve and improve to optimize collaboration and communication within teams. The latest update introduces an all-new chat and channel experience to help users work more efficiently and stay more organized. In this blog, I'll discuss the most important updates, what they mean for end users, the benefits those updates offer, and why adoption is essential.

Key Updates

The new chat and channel experience brings chats, teams, and channels together in one central place, eliminating the need to switch between different contexts. And let's be honest, no one likes having to switch all the time.

With custom sections, persistent filters, and other tools, you can stay organized and work in the way that works best for you. Upon starting the new experience, you'll get a welcome message where you can choose to start right away or be reminded later. But why wait?

What does this mean for end users?

For end users, this update means a more streamlined and integrated experience. This allows you to manage all your collaboration activities — chats, channels, or meeting chats — in one central place.

This makes it easier to stay on top of all conversations without having to switch between different apps or screens constantly. I think this will allow us to be much more efficient. Plus, you can customize the view to suit your unique way of working, for example, by viewing chats and channels separately or enabling message previews.

Benefits of the new experience

Efficiency: Having everything in one place saves you time and allows you to respond even faster to important messages.

Organization: Custom sections allow you to bring together conversations about projects or topics that are important to you, helping you stay more organized.

Accessibility: Whether you are working from your desktop or mobile app, the new filters and @mention view help you quickly focus on what's important to you.

Customizability: Everyone works in a unique way. With new customization options, you can tailor Teams chat and channels to your workflows and needs.

Why Adoption is Essential!!

Adopting these new features is crucial to taking full advantage of this enhanced collaboration and communication that Microsoft Teams offers. By embracing the new chat and channel experience, teams can work more efficiently, stay more organized, and respond faster to important conversations. Always keep in mind that a change in the way of working is a change for the end user. They will have to be able to adopt such changes. This ultimately leads to a more productive and connected work environment. You can find more adoption-related information on adoption.microsoft.com.

Wrap Up

This is a major update for end users, and it brings a lot of new features that have the potential to significantly improve the user experience. From my perspective, I still have to get used to the new look and feel. Being an experienced user of the platform, it doesn't take much adjustment for me, but I can imagine that for many standard users of Microsoft Teams, this change might feel like a big shift. It may take time for them to fully get accustomed to the new design and workflow changes, but with proper guidance (adoption), this new experience should ultimately prove beneficial.

I'm curious to know what you think of these changes!

A word from Rencore

Microsoft Teams is the go-to tool for many organizations when it comes to collaborating in the cloud. However, like many cloud-based collaboration services, it is prone to clutter and sprawl if not managed closely. A solid Microsoft Teams governance approach will help your organization keep Teams lean and easy to navigate. This holds especially true, now that Microsoft Teams combines channels and chats, potentially adding to an already cluttered structure.

Rencore Governance identifies unused, abandoned and orphaned channels, groups and chats and allows you to automatically remove unnecessary resources. The tool also automates approval processes when provisioning new resources, automatically applying policies.

You can try out Rencore Governance for free for 30 days.