With technology that completely transforms the way that people work; there are bound to be a few hiccups. Love it or hate it, Microsoft Teams is the cornerstone of workday life for many an employee these days.

The trouble is, Teams is so feature-rich that there are some perils to be had when using it – I thought I’d spend a few blogs (well, seven of them) looking at the most common ways I’ve seen people dive headfirst into the pitfalls of Teams, myself included! My aim is not to lecture – just to acknowledge that we’re all figuring this thing out together.

I’m sure you’ve seen ‘deadly sin’ number 1, and maybe even done it yourself.

Someone has posted something really interesting or thought-provoking in a Teams channel, and it inspires you to write a reply to ask a question/debate with them/send a really cool gif.

Do you:

A: Click on ‘reply’ to type in your message?

Or B: Click on New conversation and accidentally start a new thread?:

I’m sure we’ve all seen it. Whereas a ‘reply’ keeps the thread comments all connected, like this:

Creating a new conversation splits out the thread into separate parts in the channel, like this:

The result is that when the channel gets busier with new posts and replies, the separate parts of the thread become jumbled up and hard to connect, which would be a real shame if there was a killer point that gets lost.

Hopefully, we can look forward to this being a thing of the past though with the new Teams Channel experience coming soon.

The new layout puts the newest posts at the top instead of the bottom, and the differentiation between starting a new post and replying to an existing thread is much clearer I think.

You can find out more about the new channel experience here.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to new channels? Let me know in the comments – I promise I will read them and respond!

Thanks for reading 😊