Microsoft Teams can be used to create an open, collaborative workspace for your team. A key to success when creating this collaborative workspace is to make sure you use channels to organize conversations by a topic, area, or anything else. Below are some tips you can use to help keep your channels focused and organized.

Create channels to focus discussions

Once you’ve created your team, it’s a good idea to start to think about the different projects and types of conversations you need to support. Create initial channels, so people know where to contribute and to find existing conversations. Use descriptive channel names to make it easy for people to know where to go for each conversation. Add tools (such as OneNote, Power BI, or Planner) as tabs to a channel, so members have everything they need, right in the channel. You can also add a commonly used web page as a tab to a channel.

Best practice: Create teams with a broader set of members and more channels. Minimize the number of teams that require a person’s participation. Channels within a team should be thought of as topics or workstreams to aid the team in organizing their work to deliver on their joint objectives. There is no specific number of channels that should be created. Each team should craft channels based on their work, priorities, and style.

Use standard channels for conversations that everyone on the team can contribute to. Take advantage of private channels in Teams when you need a focused collaboration space with a select group of members.

Larger organizations may want to create teams as “templates” to standardize the information they capture about specific types of work. This is useful for strategic customer management, classroom management, health care scenarios, claim management, incident management, and other scenarios appropriate to a specific industry. 

Use the General channel

By default, the General channel is created for you when you create the team. There are many useful purposes for this channel:

• Use it to share an overview of what the team wants to achieve, such as a project charter or who’s who in the team.
• Use it for new team member onboarding and other high-level information that a new team member would find useful.
• Use it for announcements, or configure the SharePoint News connector to post your modern status reports to this channel.
• For new or single-purpose teams, it may be the only channel at the beginning as you decide how Teams can best support your goals.

You can’t remove, rename, or unfavorite the General channel. Channels appear in alphabetical order (with the General channel at the top). In teams with many channels, use Hide or Show to display the channels you use the most.

Consider setting up moderation in your channels

Team owners can turn on moderation for a channel to control who can start new posts and reply to posts on that channel. When you set up moderation, you can choose one or more team members to be moderators. (Team owners are moderators by default.) For more information, see Set up and manage channel moderation in Microsoft Teams.