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Prompt Like a Pro: Effectively summarize your channel conversations with Microsoft Copilot in Teams (Thu, 16 May 2024)
Keeping up with your information can be a challenge in today’s fast-paced environment. Microsoft Teams channels help you have all your information related to a certain topic in one place. Yet sometimes the conversation progresses fast, and you need help catching up. This is especially true when you're part of multiple teams and projects. With important documents being shared, ongoing conversations, and comments being added to threads, it can feel overwhelming! However, with a few simple tips and tricks, you can stay on top of your channels and avoid missing important updates. To stay in the know across all your different channels - and the teams associated with those channels - look no further than Microsoft Copilot in Teams!   Get channel highlights with Copilot in Teams Say it’s been a busy day. On top of all the emails you need to answer and chat threads to respond to, there are also all the unresolved projects and updates in your Teams channels. Copilot in Teams can help you get up to speed, fast! Navigate over to your “Chat” tab in Teams and click on the Copilot icon at the top of your chats. This opens Copilot for Microsoft 365 in Teams, which will be able to use data grounded in the Microsoft Graph to answer your questions. To start, use the prompt “What’s new in [channel] of [team]?” For example, I want to find out what I missed from the Go to Market channel in my Mark 8 Project team, so I would ask Copilot: “What’s new in the Go to Market channel of the Mark 8 Project team?”   Copilot quickly scans through that specific channel and tells me when the latest update was, who was involved in that change, if there were any new documents shared, and even links to that update, making it easy to navigate directly to that thread. When prompting, make sure you give Copilot the correct spelling of the team name in your prompt, otherwise it may not search for the right channel.   Dive deeper with follow-up prompts To go one step further, Copilot provides you with auto-generated prompts that you can use to follow up on the response it provided you from your first prompt. Going back to my example, Copilot told me that one of the members of my channel, Hadar Caspit, shared a Go-to-market plan document with the team. Instead of trying to navigate through to the different channels, teams, and posts, Copilot already suggested a follow-up prompt for me, “What are the key points in the Go-to-market plan?”   By clicking that prompt, Copilot pulls up a simple yet effective overview of the document, including the target audience, product and price strategies, etc. These follow-up prompts will change depending on the context of your team and what updates have happened to that channel since the last time you checked in. What will remain the same, however, is that they are all offered by Copilot as easy ways to go more in-depth about those updates without having to leave your Copilot conversation to find that information yourself.   Leverage relevant documents with the power of Microsoft Graph Copilot uses Microsoft Graph** to pull any relevant documents into its output. This is possible thanks to Microsoft Copilot’s Graph-grounded chat, which enables you to bring your work content and context to Microsoft Copilot's chat capabilities. With Graph-grounded chat, you can draft content, catch up on what you missed, and get answers to questions via open-ended prompts— all securely grounded in your work data.   Again, let’s go back to this Go-to-market plan that was shared in my channel. Aside from that great summary, Copilot linked the document for me directly in its answer. Now I don’t even need to leave this chat with Copilot to access the document it was summarizing for me. All it takes is one click, and I am brought directly to the Word document containing the GTM plan I had asked about.   Catch up on your channels from one place Even when it feels like the number of Teams channels you belong to - and their constant updates - make it challenging to keep track of everything, everywhere, all at once, this prompt will help make those issues a thing of the past. Copilot allows you to check in and catch up on those Teams channels, all from one simple prompt! It can help you summarize, visualize, and access documents without having to hunt through dozens of threads and replies to access that same information, making it easier for you to stay on top of your work and be more efficient, responsive, and productive. Be sure to use the recommended follow-up prompts to double-down on specific updates and get the most out of every channel, with Copilot.   Additional resources For more examples of prompts that Copilot can help you with, check out Copilot Lab! Filter by M365 app - Teams - to learn what prompts to use for meetings, in chats, and get tips for better optimized prompts in Teams and beyond!   What’s coming next Stay tuned for more tips on how to work with Copilot in Microsoft Teams and before you know it you will be prompting like a pro! If you’re already using Copilot in Teams, share your favorite prompts in the comments for the chance to get featured in a future “Prompt Like a Pro” blog spotlighting some community favorites!   *Copilot in Teams is constantly evolving and improving thanks to your input and feedback. If a Copilot prompt does not work the way you expect it to, let us know how by using the thumbs-down button that appears after a response. ** Copilot's answers are grounded in the work content and context stored in Microsoft Graph.
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New capabilities to help you manage Microsoft Teams channels from creation to archival (Fri, 17 May 2024)
Successfully navigating a fast-paced workplace requires teams to collaborate closely and share the same information. Channels facilitate this by bringing people together for common functions, projects, or interests. Designed for enduring collaboration, channels maintain their structure and purpose, even as members change, ensuring organizational continuity, transparency, knowledge sharing, and the preservation of vital conversations and decisions. When setting up a channel, you can choose from three channel types, standard, private and shared, enabling you to bring in the right collaborators while controlling access to shared resources and avoiding oversharing, without needing to create multiple similar teams. We also expanded the limit of the number of channels in a team to 1000, so you can manage a large project in one team. However, channels' persistent nature and scalability can present usability challenges if not managed as priorities and projects shift. Disorganized, redundant, or outdated channels can hinder finding relevant conversations, detracting from their role in supporting effective communication and collaboration. We are investing in enhancements that will streamline how people work and collaborate within channels from start to finish. These improvements will make creating and joining teams and channels quick and straightforward, allowing for efficient workspace setup. Collaboration within channels has been enhanced, helping everyone to stay on top if the information that matters most and contribute effectively. Additionally, retiring channels that have served their purpose will help maintain focus on current, relevant channels, reducing clutter. Our new channel related features aim to minimize distractions, simplify information retrieval, and foster effective collaboration. Create and join teams and channels with ease Channels are the hubs for teamwork within a team, allowing for more targeted discussions and collaboration. We have reduced the number of steps needed to create a new team by defaulting to “create a team from scratch”. If you would like to create a team from a template, select more create team options” and pick from the template library. This is generally available.   Not every collaboration requires a new team. So, we’ve made it easier to create a channel from the same menu you use to create a new team. Now you can avoid creating unnecessary team structures and clutter when you only need a channel. This is generally available.   Lack of awareness of existing teams can lead to duplicate teams being created. Users are now able to discover public and private teams and join them as needed. Admins can now use a new setting to control whether users can find private teams or not. The new experience combines privacy and collaboration, empowering admins to ensure that only the right people can request access to private teams, without compromising security or control. This is generally available. When joining a team, you will be able to select to show only the channels that are relevant to you, including from the channels the team owners have recommended. This will help you easily organize your list of channels to prioritize those you care about most, helping filter through the noise. This feature will be generally available in by end of year 2024. Collaborating with channels effectively When you have many channels across teams, it can be hard to keep track of all of them. Discover feed is a personalized, AI powered feed that surfaces the most relevant content in channels that you are not showing in your channel list. The discover feed surfaces channel posts you might otherwise have missed, bringing relevant content based on people you work with or topics that might interest you. Scroll through your feed, easily catch up on news, and like, comment, or share a post from the discover feed, just like any other channel post. Discover feed is generally available. To allow for a more organized and personalized channel list, select to hide or show the general channel of a team, just like other channels. By hiding less relevant channels you can declutter your channel list. Hide general channel is generally available. Coming later in the year, team owner will be able to rename the general channel to a name that better reflects the purpose of the channel for everyone in the team, helping you navigate your channel list with greater ease. Is your teams and channel list cluttered with channels you do not have interest in? Teams will automatically detect inactive channels you haven’t interacted with over the past 45 days, and automatically hide them for you. You have the option to review the list of channels and keep showing some or all of them, or opt out of automatic clean-up. This feature will roll out in Q3 calendar year 2024.   Notification settings experience is streamlined to allow better customization, enabling you to tailor it to your needs. You can choose to see your notification in the activity feed, display a banner, or turn them off. In your activity feed, you are now able to clear notifications with a single click, marking all your notifications as read at once, helping you keep up with the quick pace of conversations and notifications. These features are generally available. Soon, you will also have the option to mute all notifications for a specific channel post. You can also customize the sound of your notifications to help you stay focused, prioritize quickly, and avoid distractions. Assign different sounds to different kinds of notifications, such as urgent messages. Or mute notification sounds when you are busy or in a meeting. This will be rolling out during Q2&Q3 calendar year. Invite your colleague to participate in a discussion by sharing a link to the channel, a post or a reply. This way, they can navigate more easily and faster to specific content and conversations, without searching through many messages and files. This is generally available. Retiring channels to reduce clutter and improve focus When active collaboration in a project ends, but you need to keep the collaboration context for future reference, channel owners and administrators can archive a channel they own or manage. When archiving, you are turning off the option to have additional conversations and hiding from the channels list, for channels that are no longer used or relevant. Archiving a channel preserves channel content, including messages, files, and tabs, but removes it from the active list of channels in your or channel members’ left rail. Once a channel has been archived, actions such as messaging, reacting, commenting, are no longer available. In the event you need to revive an archived channel, you can restore the channel from the “Manage teams” menu. Archive channel is generally available.   Get more from your Teams channels Channels are where teamwork happens, bringing internal and external members together to collaborate and share. Take advantage of these tools to help manage your channels across the lifecycle, for improved focus, connection, and productivity. Learn more about channels in Microsoft Teams, and keep watching this this blog for additional features and strategies to help you get the most from your Teams channels.
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