Joining a Team
CHANGE PROMPT:
Change "Add team" to "Add or join a team": I avoided this button because I thought it would always create a new team. It wasn’t evident to me that I could browse for existing teams there too.
PREVIEW A TEAM:
Provide the ability to preview a Team without immediately joining, to see what the reason for the Team is and what Channels exist. It’s a little cumbersome to have to join, realize the Team isn’t what you thought it was, and leave.
TEAMS DISCOVERABILITY
Presently you have to know the name of a team to be able to search for it, if I am new to the company and I want to have a look to see what teams there are within my organisation I can’t currently, as I don’t know the names of them in the first place, it would be better if all public teams were visible.

I’m switching the status to Partially Done.
The request for a Preview Team is still in the works. No new information is available at this time.
Team Discoverability is still being worked upon, no details are available at this time. If you support this idea please navigate over to the main topic and vote for it! https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103/
Change Prompt: this has been completed
-Warren
116 comments
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Honor commented
If ever there was a reason to stay with Slack, not being able to find your companies "Open" teams is top of the list,
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Anonymous commented
@Warren It would be advantageous if something akin to the Team Analytics graph was shown on the "Join Team" screen. This would give an idea on whether the team you are about to join is active or not.
See the attached screenshot. Little graphs like this on the Join/Discover screen would prevent joining "interesting looking" teams only to find out they are not active. -
Anonymous commented
The link to uservoice under "partially done" would be helpful if it linked to a topic about discoverability when searching for teams.
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Mark Phillips commented
These features are primary competitive advantages for SLACK and their absence is causing considerable sturm und drang after a forced conversion foisted without proper consideration of our users.
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Mandy Conners commented
I was coming to find info about this. The description box is so tiny a preview would be great. Even once inside a team I cannot find the description anywhere to read the whole thing. So without sorting through months of chat or dozens of files to find out what its about its sometimes difficult to grasp. Even in private teams, to be able to at least see team name, owner, and team description so you know who to contact to request access would be super helpful. This was from while ago. Any more recent updates on this?
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Andrew Stanton commented
@Warren I dont think this deserves even partial credit. The UI is still confusing WRT Join or Create buttons. I can search for teams and find them by using each letter from the alphabet. Why would it be so hard to just put a list of teams in the current org somewhere?
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Mary Harvey commented
The ability to preview a public team would be great (it is a big stickler for people coming from Slack). Also the ability to search for messages in public teams that I have not joined would also be really, really useful (again a feature in Slack missing in Teams).
And no response in a LOOOOOONG time. Are you really working on this?
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Tonia commented
I feel it's really important to be able to discover Teams within your organisation. Especially if you are new to the organisation.
We try to train our users not to setup too many teams, however if they don't know what's currently available it's very easy for them to setup a new team and cause duplication.
This can then make Teams very cluttered and complicated for users and they then avoid it rather than adopting.
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samson commented
I can not see Private discoverable Teams under 'Join or create teams' section.
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Lester Memmott commented
@warren, The 3rd bullet in this list is probably the most critical. There is currently no method to browse all the public teams. Further searching in public teams is problematic. In my tests, if I search by full name, it finds them but if I search for a word that isn't the first word in the name, it won't find them. Currently it is too hard or nearly impossible to find public teams to join.
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Mike Menne commented
Team Discoverability: Centering teams around products we are attempting to inner source makes this a crucial lacking feature. The ability for people to discover teams without knowing anything about naming is needed.
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Ben Grinsted commented
The last point here needs including. How hard can it be to show all Public Teams?
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Jamey Steinmann commented
Ability to discover 365 groups both public and private already exists in outlook and we would like Teams to function the same way as joining a 365 group in Outlook does not add a user to the team or let them know if the group also has a corresponding team. When this is implemented I think the Private Team owners should be able to hide their team from discovery as this should satisfy those that require a team to not be visible.
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Mike commented
Can an admin confirm that this implementation will include the change so that ALL public teams will show up when someone goes to the Join a Team page? This is one of the biggest complaints from our users, including our Execs, is that they can't find the Teams they want because they don't show up on the Join a Team page even though they are public. At least make this a configurable option so I can our my instance of Teams show ALL the public teams.
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Anonymous commented
All public teams should be easily discoverable.
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Stace Hamilton commented
My new hires are continuously needing me to add them to teams as they cannot find them. Please add the ability to browse all public teams please. thx!
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Clark Keller commented
Desperately need to see all public teams in the list.
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Charles McCann commented
For the "Team Discovery" feature, I believe Warren was trying to link to:
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103/suggestions/19470934 -
Kayla Goff commented
@Warren, what is this topic you want us to vote on? The URL https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103/ just takes me to the main Uservoice page
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Anonymous commented
Not all Teams should be discoverable. If a team is collaborating on a confidential task, the Team and description should not be discoverable. Private Teams should remain private.