Imagine you’re a salesperson on the road and a potential customer sends you an email. The customer wants a special deal, so you need to talk more about it with your sales team. Usually, you would send the email to your coworkers, and then you would play Email tennis for the next few hours. Then, a few days later, it gets lost in your inbox. One of the main reasons for teams is to try to replace these everyday situations where email has been used a lot. I think an MS Teams Channel has a few benefits over email, including:
- It makes it possible for an instant chat to happen around almost anything.
- Stores files and attachments directly in SharePoint, so nothing in your inboxes gets lost or deleted.
- With the addition of tabs for Planner, Office Docs, Files, and so much more, there is more structure and collaboration.
- You can add a “connector” that lets you get data messages from many apps, like Trello, Twitter, CRMs, News, Market, etc.
There are a lot more benefits, but these are the big ones where a Teams Channel would work better than a “CC all” in an email. Emails are dead. To get back to the point of the post, let me show you how easy it is for that sales guy to send the email to his channel.
Step 1: Find out your Microsoft Teams Channel’s email address.
You need to know an MS Teams Channel’s email address to forward or send an email to it. This is easy to do. Just find the channel you want to email, click on the ellipsis, and click on “Get Email address.”
Step 2: Write down your email address twice.
Once you click “Get the Email address,” all you have to do is make a copy of it, and you’re good to go.
Step 3: Now, try it out by sending an email to your channel.
To do this, open your favourite email program and send a message to the address we found above.
Step 4: Let’s look at how it looks in Teams.
- It’s in the “Conversations” tab.
- Any attachments, like photos, are pulled out and saved in the channel’s SharePoint document library.
Step 5: Look at the “Files” Tab to see where the email and attachment are saved.
One cool thing behind the scenes is that the email and attachments are saved on the SharePoint site when the channel is made. It is in a folder called “Email Messages” in a document library called “Documents.” This helps in these ways:
- No data is lost
- It’s all in one place and easy to find.
- You have SharePoint’s power at your disposal, so you can add more workflow to the email (perhaps using MS Flow).
