Teams basics: chat, channels and meetings
Updated 10 November 2026 · How-to
A short guide for people new to Microsoft Teams: when to use a chat and when a channel, how meetings work, and a few habits that keep it from becoming noise.
Microsoft Teams is included with most Microsoft 365 plans, and for many businesses it replaces internal email, phone calls and the odd text message. It is easy to start using and easy to let it become a mess. A few ideas up front save a lot of noise later.
Chat is for quick, private conversations
A chat is between you and one or more named people, like a text message. Use it for quick questions and anything only those people need. Chats are hard to search later and invisible to anyone who joins the business afterwards, so decisions and information other people might need should not live only in chat.
Channels are for the team's work
A team is a group of people, and each team has channels for topics or projects. Anything posted in a channel is visible to everyone in the team, including people who join later, and files shared there are stored in the team's SharePoint site. Use channels for anything that belongs to the work rather than to a person. Reply inside a conversation rather than starting a new post, so a thread stays together.
Meetings
Schedule a meeting from the Teams calendar or from Outlook; they are the same calendar. Invitees get a link, and people outside your business can join from a browser without installing anything. Inside a meeting, use the hand-raise button in a group, mute when you are not speaking, and turn on live captions if it helps. Recordings and transcripts, if you choose to make them, are saved to the organizer's OneDrive or the channel, so treat them like any other business file.
Notifications
Teams can interrupt constantly if you let it. Set your status to Do not disturb when you need to focus, and in Settings turn off banners for channels you only need to glance at. Use the @ mention when you genuinely need someone's attention, and not otherwise.
Phones
The Teams app on your phone gives you chat, calls and meetings on the move. Set quiet hours in the app so work does not follow you to bed.
What Teams is not
It is not a place for passwords, personal information about customers, or anything you would not want kept. Messages are retained like email and can be searched by your business if ever needed. And a Teams message from a colleague asking you to buy gift cards or make an urgent payment is just as suspicious as an email saying the same thing.
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