Use retail team templates
Overview
Team templates in Microsoft Teams allow you to quickly and easily create teams by providing a predefined team structure of settings, channels, and pre-installed apps.
For retailers, team templates can be especially powerful, as they help you to quickly deploy consistent teams across your organization. Templates also help staff to get oriented with how to effectively use Teams.
Teams includes templates designed specifically for retailer needs. Use these pre-built templates to quickly create teams for staff to communicate and collaborate. In this article, we introduce you to each of these templates and recommend how to use them.
How you manage and work with team templates depends on whether you're an admin or developer.
| If you're: | Then, you: |
|---|---|
| An admin or IT pro | Manage team templates in the Teams admin center. View team templates and apply templates policies to control which templates your staff can use in Teams for creating teams. |
| A developer | Use Microsoft Graph to create teams from team templates. |
Manage team templates in the Teams admin center
As an admin, you can manage team templates in the Microsoft Teams admin center. Here, you can view details about each template. You can also create and assign templates policies to your staff to control which templates they see in Teams for creating teams.
To learn more about team templates in general, see Get started with team templates in the Teams admin center.
We currently offer the following pre-built retail team templates. To view them, in the left navigation of the Teams admin center, go to Teams > Team templates.
Note
An asterisk (*) indicates that the template is a Microsoft 365 connected template. When users create a team using the template, the connected SharePoint template is applied to the site and the team. SharePoint components such as pages, lists, and Power Platform integrations are automatically added and pinned as tabs to the General channel in the team. Users can edit these pages and lists right from within Teams.
To learn more about SharePoint templates, see Apply and customize SharePoint site templates.
Manage a Store*
Bring your retail employees together in one central experience to manage tasks, share documents, and resolve customer issues. Integrate additional applications to streamline shift start and end processes.
| Template type | TemplateId | Properties that come with this template |
|---|---|---|
| Manage a Store | retailStore |
Channels:
|
Retail for Managers*
Create a team for a set of managers to collaborate across stores or regions. For example, if your organization has regions, you might create a team for the California region and include all the store managers in that region, along with the regional manager for that region.
| Template type | TemplateId | Properties that come with this template |
|---|---|---|
| Retail for Managers | retailManagerCollaboration |
Channels:
|
Use team templates with Microsoft Graph
Developers can use Microsoft Graph to create teams from pre-built team templates. To learn more about using team templates with Microsoft Graph, see Get started with team templates using Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Teams API overview, and teamsTemplate resource type.
Here are the pre-built retail team templates.
Note
An asterisk (*) indicates that the template is a Microsoft 365 connected template. When users create a team using the template, the connected SharePoint template is applied to the site and the team. SharePoint components such as pages, lists, and Power Platform integrations are automatically added and pinned as tabs to the General channel in the team. Users can edit these pages and lists right from within Teams.
To learn more about SharePoint templates, see Apply and customize SharePoint site templates.
Manage a Store*
Use this template to create a team for each retail store location in your organization.
| Template type | TemplateId | Template channels |
|---|---|---|
| Retail - Store |
https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teamsTemplates('retailStore') |
Channels
Member permissions
|
Recommended ways to customize the Store template for your organization:
If your organization has departments within each store, add a channel for each department. Adding a channel facilitates communication and collaboration within the department.
If your organization has any internal websites (for example, a SharePoint site), consider pinning them as tabs in the relevant team channel.
Retail for Managers*
Use this template to create a team for a set of managers to collaborate across stores or regions. For example, if your organization has regions, you might create a team for the California region and include all the store managers in that region, along with the regional manager for that region.
| Template type | TemplateId | Template channels |
|---|---|---|
| Retail - Manager Collaboration |
https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teamsTemplates('retailManagerCollaboration') |
Channels
Member permissions
|
Recommended ways to customize the Manager Collaboration template for your organization:
- If your organization has any internal websites, such as a SharePoint site, that are relevant for managers, consider pinning them as tabs in a relevant team channel.
How to use team templates with Microsoft Graph
To use these templates, change the 'template@odata.bind' property in the request body from 'standard' to the TemplateIds above. For more information on how to deploy team templates, see the Microsoft Graph article on how to create a team.
Note
The channels in the template will automatically be created under the General tab.
Example: Store template extension script
{
"template@odata.bind": "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teamsTemplates('retailStore')",
"DisplayName": "Contoso Store",
"Description": "Team for all staff in Contoso Store",
"Channels": [
{
"displayName": "Additional store channel",
"IsFavoriteByDefault": false
}
]
}
Note
If you're using Microsoft Graph to create a team from an existing Microsoft 365 group or team using a Microsoft 365 connected template, the connected SharePoint template isn't automatically applied to the site or team. You'll need to manually apply the SharePoint site template after the team is created. In Teams, go to the team, select More options in the upper-right corner > Open in SharePoint. Then choose Settings > Apply a site template and select the corresponding site template.