In February of 2019, Microsoft came out and share its much-awaited Microsoft Teams Templates feature. Now publicly available, the upgrade lets users rapidly create a new team by using an existing team as a template.
With several Teams Templates available, users can quickly set up a Teams Channel, install Apps, or even pin Tabs. What’s more, as you peruse through the Template reservoir, new teams can be created based on best practices and lessons learned – leveraging a new REST endpoint, part of the Microsoft Graph API.
This brand new template repository is also segmented for specific industries:
- Education templates – Class, Staff, and PLC teams
- Retail templates – Store and Manager Collaboration
- Healthcare templates – Hospitality and Ward
It’s important to note that each category comes with multiple templates, detailing intended usage and possible guidelines for team creation.
Overview
The idea behind the Templates initiative is deceptively simple: create templates for a team building around specific business needs and teams requirement. Teams templates can be used to initiate collaboration spaces that are innovative and in-line with unique and individual content delivery objectives. Additionally, this feature has been designed with consideration for user personas (two clearly demarcated ones):
- The team member responsible for planning, curating and managing multiple teams across the company
- Developers looking to programmatically assemble a team with predetermined channels and apps
Capabilities
While properties like – Team membership, Team picture, Channel settings, Connectors, and Files & content – are not currently supported by Teams Templates, there are a number of base template types available. These base templates carry proprietary apps which may not be always accessible through the store.
Once a base template is selected, you can override these predetermined characteristics with additional properties; however, given the fact that Templates is still in a nascent stage, these are yet to be completely defined and not all can be fully overridden.
A final word
This is obviously part of a much larger picture. What began as a collaboration app (within Microsoft’s Office 365 suite), has taken on a much deeper and fast widening dimension. Pushing for acceptability and wider usage, these Templates are geared to let any user – regardless of industry, tech proficiency, or niche requirements – utilise Microsoft Teams as their go-to solution for collaboration, communication, connectivity, and teamwork.
In other words, Microsoft, with Teams, is taking the next obvious step: integrate workforce management, project management, intra-office conversations, and employee coordination within the ambit of Microsoft Teams. The Templates are almost like a ‘hook’, offering new users the opportunity to be hand-held into a rich and vibrant ecosystem of tools.
