Teams serve a different purpose for customers/end users and for staff users. For end users, unless you need to provide multiple branded interfaces to different sets of users, or expect your end users to access the system in multiple languages, it is simplest to put them all in one team with the word 'customer' in the title, such as Customer Team or Internal Customer Team.

If you need to provide a custom look and feel and customer branding to different sets of users, then you will need a separate customer team to go with each look and feel scheme. Teams can also be associated with a different default language, so it would make sense to have language-based customer teams if you were planning to run the program in a multi-lingual environment.

For staff users, teams are used to identify the functional units to whom records may be assigned. You will want a staff team for each assignment group, sometimes called a Queue. Teams can be hierarchical, so you may set up a hierarchy such that you can send an email to a mid-level team and the members of its subteams will receive the email. Users have one primary team, which defines the look and feel they see and their default table views. They can be members of as many additional teams as needed, so they are CC'd on emails and included in the assignment list for items assignable to those teams.

Teams Table Details

The Teams table is a system table with some special hard-coded fields, such as the Working Hours and language fields, the team name, label, description, Team Leader, and some screen refresh options.

It also has some custom fields that can be modified, and you can add your own custom fields to the teams table to manage any other information associated with your teams. If you edit the teams table setup, you will only be able to modify the custom fields and their layout options.

Creating new teams and accessing all of their attributes is best done through clicking the Setup gear in the top-right corner > Access > Manage Teams screen. Editing just the custom fields and adding users may also be done through the Teams tab on the left toolbar.

A user's primary team defines the default date format shown to the user on all date and date/time field lookups.  The options allow a 24 or 12 hour clock and different ordering of month and days:

The default teams have been set up in the format shown above.  These options appear on the Formats tab of the team wizard and can be changed to your preferred format.  Unfortunately, there is currently no way to mass edit these values for all teams.

Managing Team Membership

Team membership is controlled by two fields in the user record that are linked to the Teams Table: Primary Team (single choice), and Teams (multi-choice). We recommend adding a user's Primary Team to the multi-choice Teams field along with any additional teams. This way a user's entire team membership can be found in a single field, which makes searching and filtering easier.

When you initially import users into the system, you can import their primary team and teams' values, with multiple comma separated values (with no spaces after the commas). Once users are in the system, you may update team membership by editing specific users or by editing the team through the Teams tab, and looking up and importing users for the embedded Primary Team Members or Team Members tables shown for the Team. Looking up and selecting a user for either of these tables changes the linked field in the user's own user record to point to this team.

Default Teams

The teams shown below have been set up as the default teams for the application. You can delete any teams you do not need and you can rename any team to match your own company's naming conventions. You can of course also create any additional teams you need. This is best done by going to Setup > Access > Manage Teams and either editing a team or creating a new one there.

Special Teams to Manage Schedules and Working Hours

Since teams can have detailed working hours, we have set up a few special "teams" just to hold the sets of hours used to define a set of Support Hours, Availability Schedules, and Maintenance Window schedules.  These teams do not have user members, but are linked into SLAs and Business Services and are used to measure SLA and change request results in terms of the amounts of time services were unavailable outside their scheduled maintenance windows.  You can modify or add new teams to manage different schedules.