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Microsoft Teams Templates
Simon Ågren
Simon Ågren
January 17, 2022
2 min

Table Of Contents

01
What are Teams templates?
02
Base templates vs. Custom templates
03
Manage templates
04
From scratch
05
Next steps
Microsoft Teams Templates

In the previous post, I established that a team should always have a purpose and that purpose should have a structure. After going over considerations for groups, channels, and tabs structure, we will today talk about putting this all together in a templatized way - Microsoft Teams Templates.

What are Teams templates?

Microsoft Teams templates are the out-of-the-box options we have to build pre-built definitions of a team’s structure. Teams Templates contain channels and tabs, but the tabs are referred to as “apps” in the templates.

Out of the box Teams Creation
Out of the box Teams Creation

Base templates vs. Custom templates

Microsoft provides pre-built team templates available in the Teams admin-center. Pre-built templates are templates that we created for specific industries (verticals) such as Healthcare or Education.

Manage a project template
Manage a project template

Unfortunately, you can’t edit any of the base templates. Instead, you can create a custom template by copying the base template and changing the settings. However, please notice that you can’t change some of the properties in the base templates. You can also create custom templates entirely from scratch or from an existing team.

Manage templates

You can create new templates from the Microsoft Teams admin center UI and set the team structure with channels, tabs, and apps. But you can’t configure any of the teams-specific settings. You would need the Teams PowerShell module to configure everything available in the Teams templates. Let’s look at more advanced scenarios in another post and for now, focus on the UI.

From scratch

Navigate to the Teams admin center, expand Teams and click Team templates. Click the Add. In the Team templates section, select Create a brand new template.

Create a new template
Create a new template

Complete the Template name, short and long descriptions, and Locale visibility. Click Next.

Create a new template - Settings
Create a new template - Settings

Add any channels and apps that you need. I tried to use some of the advices from the Microsoft Teams Structure post. I made sure to add at least one custom tab in every channel, and also used some of the concepts of the general channel.

Create a new template - Channels and Apps
Create a new template - Channels and Apps

You might need to wait for up to 24 hours before the new custom template is available. When it’s available you can select the template when creating a new Team within the Teams client or browser.

Create a Team - Custom template
Create a Team - Custom template

If you select the new template and click Next you can see a summary of the tabs and apps that will be created.

Create a Team - Template summary
Create a Team - Template summary

Next steps

In the next post, we will look at how to use the PowerShell module with Microsoft Teams templates.

Thanks for reading
/Simon


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Microsoft Teams structure

Simon Ågren

CTA & Microsoft MVP

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