In times like Covid when everyone is shifting to a digital platform to communicate platforms like Microsoft Teams are definitely ideal. You can create group chat, channels or teams to collaborate and work together. And while group chats, channels or collaborations perform nearly the same operations you might get stuck which one to use when?
Whether you choose collaboration or group chat you can chat with your colleague, use planner, add a gif or emoji etc. But to erase the confusion I will be sharing about both in detail below.
GROUP CHATS
Starting with Group chats here are a few points you need to know about it –
- Group chats are private. This means only you and your members can see the content.
- They work on a Microsoft Backend and so exchange messaging limits will apply to the chat function.
- In a private chat there can’t be more than 250 people at a time.
- You can make calls and share files right away from your group chat.
- There is an option to also pin your most frequently used group chats.
- Apart from all this, there is an option to hide the show history whenever you add a new member to your group.
- While hiding you will have three options which is to either include or exclude the chat history or choose from a timeline.
TEAM COLLABORATION
On the other hand while talking about team collaborations this is all you need to know-
1.Team collaborations are public. This means anything you post be it a document or comment will be public.
2.Being public the content will be visible to whoever is part of that team.
3.Since the content is visible to many you tend to connect with a much wider group of people easily and smoothly. This also makes sure that everyone is on the same page.
4.While in a collaboration you also publish a formal and structured data as opposed to group chats. Group chats being private are a little more informal and relaxed cause the content is only visible to a small section.
So after these points which one should be used ?
Each one of them have their own set of benefits which make them useful to use. Below I will be sharing the reasons to use group chat as well as collaborations.
Why should you use Collaborations?
1.Firstly sharing a document into your Team, will provide access to everyone who is a part of the group to read it. The reason being in collaboration the document is saved to group-connected SharePoint site.
2.Next, You have the option to notify your co-workers about any changes using tags.
Why should you use Group Chat?
1.In group chats whatever messages you send on group will notify the members. This won’t work if the chat has been muted.
2.You have the option to send a message as urgent or important. In case you choose to send a message as urgent the recipient will be notified every two minutes. He/She will continue to get notified for a total of 20 minutes.
3.Lastly, there is an option to pop out your group chats or one to one’s in a separate window. While you do so, you can reposition, close or resize the window according to your preference.
Point to remember
The option to pop out multiple conversations is possible but it can’t happen twice within the same chat.
So, here are all the points about group chats and collaborations. Whatever you choose to use depends on you and your usage.
