Glossary
Teams
By Emil Björk · Microsoft ecosystem consultant, Gothenburg
Microsoft's chat, meetings, and collaboration app — the front door to Microsoft 365.
Microsoft Teams is the chat, meetings, and collaboration hub inside Microsoft 365. It combines persistent group chat (organised into teams and channels), video meetings and calls, file sharing, and a tab-based app surface for embedding tools like Planner, OneNote, and third-party apps.
Every team is backed by a Microsoft 365 Group, which provisions a SharePoint site for files, a shared mailbox, a OneNote notebook, and a Planner plan. Permissions and identities come from Microsoft Entra ID. For many Microsoft 365 users, Teams is the surface where the rest of the platform shows up day to day.
Worked example
A marketing team creates a new team for a product launch, which provisions a SharePoint site, a shared mailbox, and a OneNote notebook in the background without anyone touching those services directly. They add channels for "Creative," "PR," and "Launch Day," pin a Planner tab to the general channel to track tasks, and hold their weekly sync as a Teams meeting that auto-records to the channel's files for anyone who missed it. External agency partners join specific channels as guests through Entra ID B2B collaboration, without needing a licence in the tenant, while staying scoped to only the channels they've been invited into.
Common pitfalls
Creating a new team for every small project rather than a channel inside an existing team is the most common source of "team sprawl" — each team provisions its own SharePoint site, mailbox, and permissions boundary, and a tenant with hundreds of near-duplicate teams becomes hard to govern and hard to find things in. Assuming a private channel behaves like a normal channel is a related trap: private channels get their own separate SharePoint site rather than a folder in the team's main one, which matters for permissions and search. And treating Teams chat as a substitute for documentation — burying a decision in a chat thread that scrolls away — loses the decision the moment the thread does; the same information posted to a channel, or written into the team's OneNote or SharePoint files, survives.