Setting up Crewting Coffee-Breaks in Microsoft Teams

Crewting installation guide for Microsoft Teams

In this article, you will learn step by step how to install Crewting in Microsoft Teams and set up your first coffee breaks for your team. By the end, you will have created a team, connected the app, and created your first matching campaign.

💡 Optional: If you would like us to help you set up Crewting or have questions about your structure, feel free to book a personal onboarding call. You can book your call here.

👉 Note on permissions: If you cannot find the Crewting app in the Teams app store or cannot install it, you probably do not have the necessary permissions. In this case, please contact your IT administrator and forward this article to them.

Create a team

Crewting automatically connects employees for coffee breaks (“matching”). To do this, Crewting uses a team in Microsoft Teams as a participant list. Only people who are members of this team are matched with each other. All individuals who are to be connected with each other via coffee breaks must belong to a team. Theoretically, the Crewting app can be added to an existing team, but we recommend creating a new team. You can add or remove members at any time later.

Click on “Show all your teams” at the bottom of the chat list in Microsoft Teams and create a new team in the top right corner.

Create a new team, choose a name for the team, select “Public” (recommended) or “Private,” and give the channel a name. Be creative when choosing the name, e.g., company name + coffee break. You can also add a description, such as “Meet colleagues and get to know new people during joint coffee breaks. ☕️"

Click on Create

Add colleagues who would like to participate in the coffee breaks, or add colleagues to a test group (optional).

💡 Important: Only members of this team will participate in the coffee breaks. Without members, no matching will take place.

Add the Coffee-Break ☕️ - Crewting app to your team

💡 By connecting the app to your team, all current team members will automatically be included in the matching process. New members who join the team will also be automatically included in the matching process. In the settings, you can also exclude individual users or include only certain users.

How to connect Crewting to your team:

Open the Teams App Store
Search for “Crewting”
Click on “Install” and then on “Open”
Select the team you created earlier
Click on “Go” to connect Crewting to the team

Once you have connected the team, you can log in to the Crewting app.

💡 When logging into the app for the first time, each user must log in once with their Microsoft Teams account.

This is how logging in via Microsoft Teams works:

Open the Crewting app (Microsoft Teams > Chat list > Crewting > App)
Log in once with your Microsoft account
Open the User Management menu item
Check the regional settings
Adjust the default language, default location, or default time zone (optional)

You can then connect the calendar.

Connect the Workspace calendar to Crewting

💡 Note: Regardless of the calendar connection, each user logs in once with their Microsoft Teams account when they open the app for the first time.

To avoid scheduling conflicts, Outlook and Google calendars can be linked to Crewting. There are two types of calendar connections:

Workspace connection: As an admin, you can establish a workspace connection for the entire company. If the admin has permission to view the free/busy information of all other users' calendars and the connection is established, all main calendars will then be linked to Crewting.

Personal connection: Each user can also establish a personal connection to Crewting. If this connection is active, all other personal calendars can be linked to Crewting in addition to the main calendar. For authorization reasons, this connection can only be established by the respective user themselves. This is useful if other personal calendars are to be taken into account in addition to the main calendar.

⚠️ Crewting only reads availability (free/busy). Content, titles, or participants of appointments are not visible to administrators or Crewting.

How to connect the workspace calendar to Crewting:

Open the Crewting app (Microsoft Teams > Chat list > Crewting > App)
Then select the App Store menu item in the Crewting app
Search for and select the calendar provider your company uses (Outlook or Google) in the Crewting App Store.
Click on Connect
Select Workspace > Connect from the dropdown menu
Authenticate the connection

Once the workspace connection is successful, all main calendars are automatically connected and you can now create your first campaign in Crewting.

Creating a new campaign

💡 When logging into the app for the first time, each user must log in once with their Microsoft Teams account.

A campaign determines how, when, and how often coffee breaks take place (e.g., weekly, random pairings).

Open the Crewting app (Microsoft Teams > Chat list > Crewting > App).
If you haven't already done so, you can set your regional settings (default language, default location, default time zone) via the User Management menu item before you start.
Then select the Employee Matching menu item.
Click on New Campaign.
Select the team in which you want to match people. If the team is not displayed, connect the app to it first. How to do this is explained in the previous section.
Follow the remaining steps and complete your campaign.

Announce Coffee-Breaks to the team

💡 The better the communication before the start, the more successful the initiative will be. Clearly communicate the start date to the team.

Once your campaign is active, Crewting will automatically start matching at the specified time. To ensure that all employees are aware of the initiative and that it is a success, we recommend actively announcing Coffee-Breaks to the team. We explain how to do this most effectively in this article.

Updated on: 03/02/2026

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