Microsoft Teams templates
Templates standardise how new teams are created — channels, tabs, apps, and settings, baked into one starting point.
A team template in Microsoft Teams is a pre-defined blueprint for creating new teams. It bundles a set of channels, pre-installed apps and tabs, and starter settings, so users don't start from a blank slate every time.
Why templates exist
Without templates, every team grows organically — different channel naming, different apps, different conventions — and quickly becomes hard to govern. A template makes the first version of a team consistent with how you want similar teams to look.
Templates are most valuable for repeatable patterns:
- Project teams with consistent kickoff, planning, retro channels.
- Incident response teams with predefined apps for paging, status, and post-mortems.
- Department teams (HR, Finance) with standard channels for typical workstreams.
- Crisis management with the right ServiceNow / PagerDuty / Approval apps already pinned.
Built-in templates
Microsoft ships a small set of built-in templates: Manage a Project, Manage an Event, Crisis Response, Patient Care, Bank Branch, Retail, and so on. They're a useful starting point even if you don't use them as-is.
Custom templates
In the Teams admin center under Teams → Team templates, you can:
- Create a template from scratch.
- Create one from an existing team (recommended — clone a known-good team).
- Create one from an existing template and customise.
A custom template defines: the team's default settings, the channel list (standard channels only — private and shared channels aren't in templates), and tabs/apps pinned to each channel. It doesn't include channel content, files, or membership.
Assignment
Admins decide which templates show up in the "Create a team" flow via Team templates policies. A policy can hide all built-in templates and surface only the templates your governance approves. Pair this with naming and expiration policies for Microsoft 365 Groups for full control over team sprawl.
Limits
Templates are creation-time blueprints; changing the template later does not update teams that already used it. If you add a new app to a template, only teams created from that point on get it. Treat templates as defaults, not living standards.
For organisations creating many teams a week, a few well-maintained custom templates pay back the setup time many times over.