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Microsoft 365 – Color coding your work

Colors are in, and the visual concept of them are important. Here is a comprehensive list of colors and purposes in Teams and OneDrive.

This is an extention to my previous article, Microsoft Teams – The purpose of your teams.

Main colors that fit most organizations

🟦Blue: Organisational

Blue is often linked with structure, trustworthiness, and professionalism. Many corporate and organizational tools use blue to portray a sense of order and reliability.

The color symbolizes: Stability, trust, order, and reliability.

Teams

Our departments and leader teams use this color to keep group-related information.

OneDrive

These folders are for internal company documents related to your organization.

🟩Green: Projects

Project tools like Planner and Project are green. Furthermore, green often signifies growth, innovation, and progress — concepts intrinsically tied to projects.

The color symbolizes: Growth, innovation, forward momentum, and evolution.

Teams

Our Project teams, these can include external user and contains all information relevant to the project.

OneDrive

Minor projects that don’t need a team or project documentation in early stages.

🟧Orange: Topics

Orange is a vibrant and energetic hue often associated with enthusiasm, creativity, and determination. Topics or discussions in a business context can be dynamic and ever-evolving, making orange a suitable choice.

The color symbolizes: Creativity, energy, dynamism, and enthusiasm.

Teams

Topical teams contains knowledge about certain areas in our business.

OneDrive

Information about topics I create or follow, this can be presentation slides, recordings or research papers.

🟨Yellow: Customers

Yellow is a bright and attention-grabbing color that has traditionally been associated with happiness, warmth, and communication. Considering that effective communication is pivotal in customer relations and that customers are the focal point in most businesses, the color yellow is apt.

The color symbolizes: Communication, attention, warmth, optimism, and clarity.

Teams

Our customer teams are used to share information between us and our customers.

OneDrive

When sharing information with customers, have a folder for each company and add documents you shared in them.

Supplementary colors

🟥Red: Sales and Marketing

Red is a vibrant and energetic color that commands attention. It’s often associated with urgency, making it apt for sales where you want customers to act quickly. Additionally, it’s a color that stimulates excitement and passion, which aligns well with marketing campaigns’ intent to captivate and engage audiences.

The color symbolizes: Passion, urgency, attention, energy, boldness, and action.

Teams

In addition to the department teams, sales and marketing might need “topical” teams for their work.

OneDrive

Any material related to sales and marketing that I work on.

🟪Purple: HR or Personnel

Human Resources deals with the human aspect of the organization. Purple combines the calm stability of blue and the passionate energy of red. This makes it an apt representation for a department that bridges the relationship between the workforce and the management, ensuring both stability (from blue) and the passion or vitality of the organization’s employees (from red).

The color symbolizes: Dignity, value, ambition, wisdom, empathy, and transition.

Teams

In addition to department teams, HR or leaders might need teams to connect and handle personnel information, documentation or dialogue (private channels are useful here)

OneDrive

Personnel documents that are in transition, these usually contain sensitive information, so these folders need to be reviewed often.

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