Linked – Microsoft is reportedly working to merge Teams text chat and channels with a new UI
I’ve got my eyes on this:
Microsoft is reportedly working on a major UI improvement for its Teams services. The change is supposed to finally merge its text chats and channels into one location in the future.
In all the years of being waist-deep in the Teams universe, one common thread for getting users to use Teams channels has been the difference between how a new chat gets their attention right away and how a new post in a channel does not. Thus, people have become used to chatting and ignoring channels, making them less useful in collaboration.
After all, if no one notices information being shared in a channel, you’re not collaborating.
Microsoft sees this struggle, too. They’ve tried allowing users to set channel notifications and are now trying to put all communication in one place. I’m also curious to see if this causes confusion for users when determining whether they are using chat or a channel.
Many of us have different retention strategies for chat vs. collaboration channels. Perhaps we should set a very short policy for chat because we consider that to be ephemeral, but a long period for channels is needed because that is part of the project the team was created for. Users getting confused about where communication is occurring could create some record-keeping issues if users end up communicating in the wrong place.
Then again, how many of them are using chat because it’s easier when we’d like them to create a record in a channel now?
We’ll see how this works when it rolls out. I’m sure I’ll be writing about it in the M365 Newsletter.
