Heads Up – Your Teams Button Is Going to Disappear (Episode 61 Transcript)

Hello friends and welcome back to the 1,001 Business Problems Solved with Microsoft Teams podcast. I hope you’re already having a good week if you’re listening to me on our usual Monday drop day.

We believe your time is important, so every episode is about six minutes in length so you can get in, get some value, and get back to your day. We generally try to focus on a specific business problem in each episode; but today, I must cover something that is not a business problem you may face due to the internal machinations of your business.

It’s a problem I think Microsoft is causing for businesses. An unforced error if you will.

I covered this several weeks ago and thought perhaps the problem had gone away because Microsoft had listened to feedback and stopped forcing this change on users. But…we’ve had a rash of clients in the past couple weeks calling us in a panic, so Microsoft evidently didn’t get the message.

Besides, since we think this problem of the disappearing Teams button is so detrimental to organizational efficiency, covering the same topic twice is probably not a bad idea.

If you’ve been around podcasts very long, you know that new listeners to a podcast will often binge listen to all previous episodes because they have found something of great value to them and they don’t want to miss anything.

Our philosophy is that since business leaders are very busy by their nature, we don’t think they as our target audience have the time to binge-listen all previous episodes. Binge listening is ok if you’re into real crime or history podcasts, but this podcast is all about solving specific problems.

That’s why most episode titles are in the form of a problem statement. It gives our new listeners the ability to scan all the titles so they can focus only on those episodes that describe problems they’re facing without wasting time listening to solutions they don’t need right now.

Anyway…I’m rambling, so back to the problem at hand.

So, if the Teams button is no longer visible in the panel on the left under the activity and chat buttons, how in the world does Microsoft expect you to get to the channels where you’ve put all your files, apps, and shortcuts?

Well, your channels are now under chat, which seems nuts to us especially since the new arrangement seems to make no logistical sense.

If your button hasn’t yet disappeared, Microsoft just hasn’t gotten around to you yet. In that case, you’ll want to bookmark this episode for future reference.

Why is the Teams button important? Well, it’s not important if you’re like a lot of businesses and don’t leverage channels fully. We are humongous advocates for leveraging all the functionalities of channels and if you’ve listened to me for very long, you’ve probably built some awesome channels.

In that case, you definitely want to get that Teams button back. It’s how you and your employees quickly access channels and all the awesome functionality within.

To get the Teams button back where it used to be, click the chat button. You’ll then see an ellipsis at the top of the list of chats in the navigation panel. That’s the three little dots.

Click it.

Then, click on the customize view option and you’ll see two big buttons at the top: Combined and Separate. Simply click on separate and your Teams button will magically reappear.

But, let’s say you don’t want all your employees having to do this one-by-one when the button disappears across your entire organization. No problem!

Ask your Teams central administrator to bring the button back for all employees in one fell swoop. He or she can do so in the central Teams admin panel under policies. That’s where the centralized choice setting for combining or separating chat and channels is located.

I hope you found this episode helpful. If so, please hit the subscribe button in your podcast player of choice and consider leaving a rating or review.

Next week, I’m going to give you a solution I know all businesses with employees need. Because the listeners of this podcast are the cream of the business crop, I’m sure you’ve developed some killer policies and procedures to streamline and standardize your business.

Now that you’ve moved to Teams, you can’t put those policies and procedures in the files tab because all team members can edit the documents. Yes, you can set custom permissions on every file, but that’s far from convenient.

I’m going to tell you how to set those permissions one time and forget about them. It’s a great way to rest assured that nobody is going to mistakenly alter or delete your important documents.

And, while we’re wrapping up this episode, I want to also throw something out there for you. We have a long list of ideas for future episodes already, but if you have a current business problem, or even a successful process that takes a lot of effort – please let us know about it in the comments. Your real-life business problem might just become an episode in the near future.

And with that, I'm going to call it an episode. I’ll catch you next week. This is Annie, signing off!