Microsoft Teams chat vs Teams posts

With many companies changing the way they work, Microsoft Teams has become an essential tool for businesses and a hub to collaborate with colleagues and external companies. Microsoft Teams Chat and Team Posts within Microsoft TEAMs can provide similar functionality, but are different and if used correctly, maximize the performance of your TEAMs usage. Hopefully the content of this article will help you make the decision between using TEAMs Chat or making posts in a TEAM.

Microsoft Teams chat

– Targeted chat and collaboration with internal and external users

Microsoft Teams chats are private and only members of the chat can see content that has been posted. Teams Chats can be small groups of 2/3 people up to the limit of 250 people. These can also be good for chatting with external customers and companies.

If a member needs to be added to a chat, this can be done by clicking on the member icon and then entering the name or email address of the person you want to add. Teams also gives you a number of other features, for example you can prevent the previous chat history from being displayed to the new member, you can record all history or only record history from a selected number of days that you want the new member to see.

When you send a message in a chat, a notification is sent to all members within the chat so nothing is missed. You can even set the message as important or urgent, if this is set, the recipient will receive notifications every two minutes for twenty minutes, which means the message will not be missed.

Posting in a Microsoft Teams

– A bulletin board for posts to an entire team or channel

Teams within Microsoft TEAMs come with a “Posts” board, in addition to a site in SharePoint to add files/folders that your designated team can access. Making a post in a Microsoft team or a channel in a team is similar to chat, but these posts are visible to all members of the team/channel and cannot be sent to a select group of people, as you can do in chat.

Posts in TEAMs are meant for a team to post important and structured information, such as news about an event, a change in some files or folders, or reminding people about a meeting that is coming up, etc.

Once an item is posted within a Microsoft team, a notification that something has been added is not displayed, it is only added for the next time you visit the team section.

Overview

If you want to post update or news article for an entire team or company, it is best to create a post in the Microsoft team. This will then allow everyone to read the information when they next access the team , this is a rigid structure, so anything important to be mentioned should be done this way. This allows everyone to read the information when they next access the team, but without notifications, it may be missed by an end user. Posts in Teams are not intended for chat and should be treated as a structured newsboard for that particular team.

Chatting in Microsoft TEAMs is a fluid way to contact and communicate with the specific people you need. It’s a way to quickly message back and forth with people and allows you to easily add people within your organization and externally as needed. Chat is powerful and allows you to add screenshots and share files/folders using links from OneDrive or SharePoint with members collaborating on documents.

Knowing the differences between these features and when to use them best will help you get the most productivity out of TEAMs and unlock the true potential of the cloud for communication and collaboration with anyone, anywhere.

Source: cetsat