Make "Teams" and "Chat" the same Tab
There is no reason that Teams and Chat should be different top level categories in the left navigation. They are the same thing, perform exactly the same function, and making two different items simply confuses the navigation and makes badge notifications and discoverability much more difficult to use.
Please combine Chats into the Teams tab so that you can browse all conversations in one place rather than needing to navigate to different tabs to see different conversations.
Chats and channels perform essentially the same function, which is talk to some people and collaborate. Forcing the user to check two different lists to see if somebody is messaging them is a really bad experience, it is like having two different chat apps.
This is one usability issues that makes Teams less usable for collaboration than both Slack and Skype.
Samuel Sze
shared this idea
The team has not made a decision on whether to move forward with this feature. We will update when we have new status to share.
391 comments
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Briana Tarantino
commented
Yes, I completely agree! Would like to see Teams & Chat @ the same time without having to click out of one to see the other. Missed communications because of this.
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Eric Yew
commented
My team ends up creating a separate chat group instead of using the teams channel to converse and collaborate as there is a disconnect between the teams and chat tab. Inconvenient to move between the 2.
But chat groups lacks some of the features of team channels making it not as powerful. Total UX/UI fail keeping it separate... -
Fred
commented
Given that this was raised in Feb 2017, and we keep being promised updates, can we have something other than "The feature team still has this under review" or "No decision made"
There is a demand for this to happen, so what is the hold up please ?
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Jacob
commented
Slack did this right.
Please don't reinvent the wheel and complicate things unnecessarily.
Single list with teams and conversations would work great.
If for some odd reason, you think the distinction is needed, let's make 2 different views and allow users to choose in app preferences. 🙏
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Anonymous
commented
I miss information from my colleagues every day if I don't actively switch back and forth between channels. Very unproductive and annoying. I want to see all my channels in one place. I miss mattermost, which offers this helpful option. Can you please change that?
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Anonymous
commented
PLEASE allow us to do this. Constantly swapping tabs is so very frustrating.
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Gregory Kingsley
commented
Very annoying!!! Activity feeds is a hot mess and having to switch between the two feels like I'm using two different collaboration applications.
I long for the days of the ICQ drag off app icon.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes, this is annoying. I want to see all my active conversations in one place.
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Oz Oscroft
commented
I'd completely disagree with this request and it would ruin Teams for us. Channel messaging in
Teams is all about team collaboration - ensuring the whole team can see what's going on in each area and participate in conversations started by their colleagues. Chat and group chat are for private conversations which are invisible to the rest of the team and files shared within them are also kept separate from the the Teams (SharePoint) file store.They clearly provide different functionality for different purposes so should not be combined automatically. If people require these two separate sets of functionality to be combined then it MUST be done as an optional setting for Admins to configure to keep them as they are at the moment if they wish.
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Brandon Carnahan
commented
Maybe just have a chat channel in the topics might be a compromise. I think allowing for Chat conversations to have posts that can be separated by topic would be nice and this is how it works in the channels and also will allow for those chats to be under the relevant topic/project, etc. If this is not popular, then how about just setting up Chat so it works similar to the Teams channels and allows group chats that will allow for separate posts that individuals can reply to just that conversation versus just having chatter that is hard to roll back up to a specific conversation.
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Carly
commented
Disagree. The distinction is important to some people. There is a still a purpose for one-on-one chats or small-group chats unrelated to a team, and those need clear separation from what goes in a team channel to avoid confusion.
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Jeff
commented
I agree, having to switch between views is too much. Either integrate the views or allow for popout windows so I can have them side by side. I understand that Teams has functionality that Chat does not and vice versa, but you could just make all functionality in one. And if you do keep them separate and just do the popouts, please add the ability to reply to a conversation in Chat so that your reply is relevant. (Or enable it so that I can PIN my Teams chat to the list under CHAT so that I can at least be notified and see in bold when a new chat arrives)
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Anonymous
commented
I agree! This needs to be seperated, I have missed many important conversations that rushed by w/o my ability to interact with because I was stuck in conversations and escalations on another tab... To be told in Chat to head over to Teams to catch up on a conversational thread, and vice versa, is not ideal...
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Beth
commented
Would like Chat to have a "pop out" option to allow the chats to continue and have access to them while working in other functions within Teams - without having to leave the workspace and go to chat, then click through to return to your workspace.
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Michael
commented
We really need this, the current way of having to switch between the Teams and the Chat tab is very cumbersome, and I often miss if someone posts something in Teams, as there is no real alarm if something happens there.
I strongly support such a split view, this is also how Slack does it, and it is much more intuitive than having it on two separate tabs.
I would suggest to make an optional view like in the attached file - all I would want is that on the left side, I had two groups, on top the Teams, and on the bottom the Chats, like it is done in Slack. All other views could stay are they are. This could be entirely optional, but this would strongly simplify my life and the life of our organization. So please implement something like this. Thank you. -
Nick
commented
What’s quite unhelpful for me is that the filter options differ between the two tabs, too. Ideally both should have the same capability if they are to be kept separately. Would need for example to filter just channels with unread messages, like I can for Chats.
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Tony Paladino
commented
I disagree. Chat and channel conversations have their own uses.
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Anonymous
commented
Please do this. Nobody in my organization uses Teams tab or the Channels and instead we end up creating group chats. Messages shared in Teams and Channels simply get lost on the way since they are in a separate tab which consists of sub tabs (Teams) and sub sub tabs (Channels)...
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Anonymous
commented
I think the community would be better served if messaging was a stand alone app that could be accessed in Teams (embedded) or like a standard instant messenger.
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Anonymous
commented
I disagree that these should be combined. I understand that some use Chat / Posts as the same thing but I don't personally. I use Chat as a 1:1 engagement with my colleagues, whether they are part of my 'Team' or not (mostly not actually) and so with those that I am part of many 'virtual teams' Posts can be used to announce things and correspondingly discuss them. For multi-person chat, I invite other folks. All seems logical to me. I will admit less experienced colleagues get confused sometimes but that is mostly because of inexperience and they come from S4B where everything was a chat... but I like the distinction
