Turbocharging Teams - Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams - Episode 7: Chats: 1:1 Chats / Group Chats / Meeting Chats

18 Sep 2020
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By Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams focuses on tips and tricks to help you get the most out of using Microsoft Teams. In this episode of Turbocharging Teams we look at the different types and capabilities of chats: 1-1 chats, group chats and meeting chats.

 

 

Microsoft Team transcript Microsoft Stream Generated Automatic Transcript

 

Everyone and welcome to another episode of turbocharging teams.

My name is Dino Caputo and once again I'm joined by Kevin

Kieller. And today we're going to talk to you about chat.

So within teams you can do chatting with individuals in

your company with people in a group or within the context of a

meeting. So we're going to spend a few minutes just showing you

some of the different options and functionality related to

chat. So along the left you see a standard list of chats in your

chat application that are showing so you can see all the

one to one chats that I've been a part of. You can also see

group chat switch our chats that you would initiate with other

people within your tenant.

It's important to note that a group chat can only happen with

people that are a member of your tenant or a guest that you

invited to your tenant. You can't have a group chat with

Federated users. Those are users that you might be federating

with belong to another tenant.

That you have not invited as a

guest. And then Lastly, you have a meeting chat, which is a chat

that occurs within the context of a meeting that was scheduled.

Or an ad hoc meeting.

In this case, you could invite people that are promoted from

outside your company so they would appear in your chat

here. So lots of different options here in terms of chats

within one to one group, chat and meeting, you can sort of

tell by the icons in the in the corner of each of these

windows you see. For example, in a meeting chat you have the

calendar icon which is depicted in the top left

corner in a group chat you would just you wouldn't see

that calendar, so you can see the difference is there.

This is a one to one chat that's popped out. You can see I've had

a. I'm having a one to one chat with Kevin and recently

Microsoft Microsoft team says now the notion of pop out chats

and meetings that you can pop out and have so makes makes the

ability to for you to focus on

that chat. And here we have a chat between Kevin and I'm.

In terms of searching for chats often you may have a

conversation you want to find that conversation. What you can

do is in the top bar of your. Microsoft Teams client you can

just say you can search for something. So here I want to say

good morning and happy Friday.. Remember Kevin said something to

me about that and I wanted to look at the slide he was

presenting or the content he was talking about. So I just simply

type that in here and it brought in. It shows you along the left

hand side depicted by 1 where he said good morning and happy

Friday. Kevin likes to say Good morning and happy Friday. A lot

of very nice. I'm a very nice person there, so there's there

were two hits on that particular phrase. An I selected the first

one and it shows it on the right hand side. I could have also

used control F4 Slash find in that toolbar and that the

important distinction there is that I could. Then it would then

center it on the recording talking teams so I could

contextually search for if I

knew. We did something within the context of our meeting

talking teams. I could limit the scope of that search there.

So it's some nice options in terms of doing some

searching for chats.

Think there's we talked about that that that searching pieces

evolving, and so yeah, the slash find you can control the the

scope of where it searches, but we've had mixed results in terms

of, you know, in preparing for this, like repeating the same

search gave different search results. So I would say search

is evolving. Would that be a fair? That's probably a nice way

to put it for sure they have nice. I'm trying to be now.

So OK in this. Lastly, here's here's an example of meeting

chat. And once again, you can see along the left rail you can

see this is from one of my. O365A recordings. You can

definitely tell it's a meeting chat depicted by that purple,

like circular icon. That's got the calendar icon in it. And

again, I could. You know, I'm just going back and replaying a

chat that has happened within the context of a meeting. So

again, if you if there was something you wanted to go and

find within the context of the meeting and go back now and

actually look at the chat that was happening within that

meeting.

So that's kind of neat.

And with that, I'll pass it along to Kevin to talk about

accessing a meeting chat. Yeah, this was interesting because

like a meeting chat is, you know. I mean, I think people

look at finding scheduled meeting. You have a chat and

then you know there is a a record of it. That's great.

What's not so great is when you search for content that you know

happened in a meeting chat. It doesn't seem that it's always

found, so that's that's why I say search is evolving.

But one of the nice things is a colleague was asked to have like

daily meetings for the next 2 weeks, and you invited a whole

bunch of people and a whole bunch of people declined 'cause

they said, heck, no. I'm not going to show up every morning

for this meeting, but what I was pointing out is OK, but there's

this persistent meeting chat, so maybe you could encourage people

even if they had feedback 'cause they're rolling out a new

system. And so this this was like a daily check in to see.

If there was problems, So what I said is, hey, you could have

them put whatever new information or feedback in the

meeting, chat and that way they didn't have to necessarily show

up for the meeting. If it wasn't an inconvenient time.

But that led me to say, OK, well, how do you access the

meeting chat and it turns out that if you wear number one, if

you go to your calendar application on the left rail in

teams, then it pops up this the box. That's kind of shown to the

right, and I kind of had ignored all of this because you know,

you click on, you know, like their record, 2 episodes of

turbocharging teams is shown a number 2, and then you get this

pop-up. And I would just, you know, do that to join. But there

is an option that shown as item number 3 this is chat with

participants and specifically if you got recurring meetings that

then brings you into the meeting chat that is persisted across

all of the recurring meeting series. So that's kind of cool.

Important to note here. I think it was maybe in the last

episode, but in one of the previous episodes we talked

about the differences between the teams calendar in the

outlook calendar. And this chat with participants is only

available in the teams kind of calendar. If you access it in

outlook, it will let you join the meeting, but it has no

idea of how to bring you into that meeting chat, so that's

that's something that was interesting and it addresses a

specific use case, especially for recurring meetings. So if

we go on to the next slide.

With respect to group chats. I had another case where you know in in many

organisations creating a team and creating a channel there may

be some process that is involved so they may have restricted it

so that you don't get too many teams or too many channels.

Well, a group chat is, you know, is kind of like, not entirely,

but it's. It's kind of like a mini channel, and so if you want

to create a group chat, go to chat. You click on the little

edit icon where showed with number one up pops this line

number 2 where you can enter the peoples names as Dino pointed

out, you can invite people that are you know obviously in your

organization. Or our guests? You can't just type in even though

it says I just notice this. It says you email, but that I mean

you can't just type in an arbitrary email, 'cause then it

it gives you this little thing it says. Do you want I, can you

know personally or whatever not found? Do you want me to search

external and it kind of makes it sound like you can just? It's

going to do something but you can't just add, you know, an

arbitrary email. But so once again, you know people obviously

in your tenant in guest your

tenant. And then Dino did talk about how the icons are

different and specifically for a group chat.

It creates an icon that's kind of a mash up of individual user

pictures, so you can see in this case you know Dino has a

picture, although you always look better in person then

you're kind of sweater vest in your in your picture, but but

then you know and then Rodolfo and Roberto it's got the two

hours. But you know I don't know if you had 20 people, how it

matches it up. I haven't haven't figured that out, but it has

more of a visual kind of icon that's you know as opposed to

us. Tina pointed out the calendar icon, so that's how you

can create a group chat. I kind of, you know, I do consider it

like a mini channel because it's persistent. You know you can

have that chat and you also have access to files etc so.

Yeah, it's really. It's a really nice feature because often if

you have a running, you know if you have a war room or if you

have something that occurs every day. It's just a nice way to

bring people together and just talk about whatever is at hand.

So often I see I see these used a lot with many of my customers

and then you can pin it to the top right 'cause you have all

these chats. And if you don't pin it you can't find it right.

Despite that the icon looks differently so you know, like

most things you can pin it and then it's at the top and you know.

 

 

What we what we want to talk about here is I mean so

regardless. Kind of of the you know whether it's a one to one

group meeting or really channel chat. Many things are the same.

Some things are a little bit different. So channel

conversations are threaded, which means you know there's

replies to specific topics as kind of shown in the upper left.

Microsoft is trying to create that distinction, so depending

on your tenant, you may or may not have this new conversation

button. Before some people, it might just say start a new

conversation. So absolutely in a channel there's a real

difference between replying to a specific topic you want to type

in that reply box, and if you want to start a conversation on

a new topic you want to click on the new conversation button, or

some people just has a you know.

Text box at the bottom.

But in the one to one chats the meeting Chesson Group.

Just they're not threaded, so you don't really have this

concept of topics and replies.. They look mostly the same. So

item number one shows.

A one to one shot item number 2 shows a group chat, so there are

mostly the same, but you may get like different by default. A few

number of different options as seen on the bottom there.

But in any of the types of. Chads, If you click on the icon,

I mean it's A with that little pen on the far left, then you

get additional items in terms of formatting, which is shown in in

item number 3. So you get all the different formatting

features. So all the chats give you access to rich formatting

except and this is The only exception. If it turns out that

you're the person you're

chatting with. Is an external contact that still using Skype

for business and I picked one here like where the number 4 is.

You can see it has a little. Skype indicator you. In that

case you really just get like kind of plain text chat. So a

lot of different types of chats.. Most of 'em work the same with a

few differences, and certainly there's a lot of different use

cases and we talked about some of them today, so hopefully that

will help you better understand How you can use chat.

Hope you you know you learned a few

things and as always, we're open to feedback or contact

information is there and have a good rest of the day using some

of the tips and tricks that we talked about in this episode of

turbocharging teams. Thank you. Thanks, see you later.

 

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