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Microsoft Teams Naming Conventions
I have a slight dilemma and I can't seem to find useful resources online so I was hoping to pick your collective brains? The problem I have is around naming conventions. The directives we established for active directory don't fit for creating new Teams.
Some of the teams have a geo focus / some global
Some of the teams are cross functional and geo focussed
Some are very specialised non geo focussed.
Is there any advice on naming conventions that I could give out? How have you organised your users so their is some logic to their name choice in MS Teams?
We have two suggestions.
PREFIX (the IT department first choice, due to 'search-ability'):
ORG-management-namePRJ-management-name
There is also a suggestion to have shorter prefixes, ORG=O, PRJ=P
SUFFIX (the users first choice):Name (ORG-management)
Name (PRJ-management)
If you have suffix it's more simple for the user to see what team they are in and you can @mention the team with better names, for ex @prj-management vs. @thenameyouhavechosen
JohnKelly I know this is an old post. But it still an important question :-).
Our company is located in multiple countries so for our naming convention we use:
COMPANY-COUNTRY-DEPARTMENT
COMPANY-COUNTRY-...
For Global teams we use the term CC (Cross Country).
COMPANY-CC-DEPARTMENT
COMPANY-CC-...
- It is very important, and I would like to take it a step further. I submitted a change to Microsoft to prevent users from changing the Teams name.
We have a strict naming standard, but some have figured out how to actually change the name of a Team, so our standards are not holding up well.
so one thing we realized on our journey was to not name teams like
CONTOSO - DEPT/team name
CONTOSO - functional team
CONTOSO - working group
because basically folks will have a harder time navigating since every team would have the prefix - company name
so we did it a bit differently around having all official dept teams/working groups/functional groups created by IT up front with specifics.. and then everything else created by users is up to them..
don't beat yourselves up over "team sprawl" it's kind of designed that way
Thanks Kevin Watts Our new system is working well - with the exception of the cross functional teams but as suggested above we will use channels for that. Definitely going to borrow "team sprawl" love that.
It makes me wonder how many of you have users who have created "The Dream Team".......search through your teams you probably have at least one ;-)
- We don't have a Dream Team, but we do have a Food Channel...
JohnKelly to add to what others have said, it also makes sense to set a guideline length for the Team name. Since you can't (at time of writing) change the width of the column that displays Team names, you should limit the name to 20-25 characters to prevent them from being truncated in the interface.
JohnKelly very good question, i think all of us need to know a simple naming convention, but...
in our case, we used a logical prefix for the use case of the team. after that a two digit for the year (if a team has a time limit) and at least a logical name (Customer name or a short description).
here an example:
PRJ-19-<Customer> PRJ for Project / 19 for the Year 2019 / <Customer Name>
this helps for select easy all Projects, or Projects in the year 2019 or Teams with the customer <xy>
so you can build your own free Prefix for your use case... ;-)
We have two suggestions.
PREFIX (the IT department first choice, due to 'search-ability'):
ORG-management-namePRJ-management-name
There is also a suggestion to have shorter prefixes, ORG=O, PRJ=P
SUFFIX (the users first choice):Name (ORG-management)
Name (PRJ-management)
If you have suffix it's more simple for the user to see what team they are in and you can @mention the team with better names, for ex @prj-management vs. @thenameyouhavechosen
Sara Hällgren both excellent suggestions. Thank you. I'm settling on the following at the moment.
ORG = Organisation wide responsible
GEO = Our standard geo location code
Function = Function or Department
Name = Team Name
+G = Team has Guests
ie
ORG-Mktg-Digital+G = Our Organisation wide Digital Marketing Team with guests.
Max characters 20
- Have you seen this naming policy feature. It was only released recently that will allow you to reinforce some of the decisions you make on naming conventions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365/admin/create-groups/groups-naming-policy
ta_pb Thanks for the information, I'll take a look. It's not really an enforcement issue, more a practical one. I will soon be a member of circa 50 Teams - how can I quickly tell from the name of each team who it is and what the main purpose of the team is.
Thanks again for the info.
Appreciated
John
- This is a good question and I think the beauty of teams is that it allows you communicate with these remote sites/offices more effectively. Personally I would probably go with Function based teams ( sales, tech support.. etc ) and invite users who correspond to those teams. But you can equally configure Region based teams ( UK, France, Germany etc ) with more function based channels within that team...
WelshViking Thanks for your response. To illustrate further the problem in a previous company one user created a team called MyTeam. This was before I arrived!
I have devised codes before;
1st Three Char = Geo Location
Then 3 Char = Function
Then 4 = Scope
etc....
but here I have let's say Global Marketing Who want to work across functions ie R&D and Sales, to get input for campaigns and have guests.
JohnKelly I think your convention looks good. You just need to add a special code for teams that work across locations (e.g. Global), and for teams that work across functions (e.g. Corp).
Another trick we have used: custom logos. You could for example have a color for the location and a symbol or acronym for the function.
Also remember to use pinning to help people focus on their core activities.
