Where your team plays
Running Doorly in Microsoft Teams
Sophie Aitchison
Founder, Doorly · 30 July 2026
In a Microsoft 365 company, Teams is the front door to the working day — so that's where a December ritual has to land. This is how to run Doorly's 24-day murder mystery in a Teams-first organisation: which channel to use, what to post, and how to reach the substantial number of colleagues who open Teams twice a day and no more.
To be straightforward about it: Doorly is not a Teams app. There is no app to publish to your tenant, no admin consent screen, no Graph permissions, and no access to your organisation's messages or files. Doorly is a web link. Teams is where your people already are, so Teams is where you paste it.
Why no app is the point
Anyone who has tried to get a third-party app approved in a Microsoft 365 tenant knows the shape of that project: a request, a security review, a conversation about data residency, and a date somewhere in the new year. For a four-week seasonal activity, that process is the reason the activity doesn't happen.
A link skips all of it. Nothing is installed, nothing is consented to, and nothing in your tenant changes. That also makes the conversation with IT a short one — there isn't a permissions model to explain, because there aren't any permissions.
Choosing where it lives
Teams is more structured than a flat chat tool, which helps here — you can give the calendar a permanent home rather than letting it scroll away.
- A channel in your company-wide team — General works, but a dedicated Social or Christmas channel works better, because it doesn't compete with announcements people are obliged to read
- Pin the calendar link as a tab at the top of the channel — it stays one click away all month, which matters far more in Teams than in a chat-first tool where people scroll
- Post in the channel's Posts tab, not in a group chat — chats bury things and can't be joined late; channel posts persist and are searchable in January when you're writing the wrap-up
- Skip @everyone on the daily posts. Save the tag for day one, the accusations opening, and the reveal
What to post through the month
The doors unlock automatically — nothing you post makes the calendar work, it only makes it visible. In Teams that visibility matters more than in a chat-first company, because plenty of your colleagues genuinely aren't watching the channel all day.
Use a proper post with a subject line for the big moments — launch, mid-month, accusations, reveal — because those get surfaced in activity feeds and email digests, which is how you reach the people who aren't in the channel. Use quick replies for the daily door, where it doesn't need ceremony.
Write like a colleague, not a system. "Door 14 and I've completely changed my mind about the gardener" outperforms "Day 14 is now unlocked" by an embarrassing margin.
- Day 1 — a channel post with a subject: what it is, five minutes a day, there's a winner on Christmas Eve
- Most mornings — the day's door as a reply or short post, with an opinion attached
- Around day 12 — a proper post for the mid-month turn, when the alibis stop lining up
- Around day 20 — accusations open; this one earns an @channel
- Christmas Eve — the reveal and the winner, announced where everyone can see it
Reaching people who aren't in the channel
Most Microsoft 365 companies have a meaningful group of colleagues for whom Teams is not the whole day — frontline staff, field teams, people whose work is not at a keyboard. A calendar that only lives in a chat channel quietly excludes them, and they're often the people an engagement programme most needs to reach.
Because it's one URL and not an app, the same calendar goes out through every other channel you already have. It behaves identically in each, and everyone who plays counts the same in your participation numbers.
- In the December all-staff email, as a link near the top rather than the footer
- On the SharePoint or Viva Connections homepage, as a tile that stays up all month
- As a QR code printed and stuck up wherever people actually pause — the kitchen, the break room, the back of the door
- In the deck for the December all-hands, so the ritual gets named out loud once
Time zones and catching up
Doors unlock by date rather than by hour, so every office gets the same door on the same day and the discussion is genuinely shared. Nobody is a day ahead spoiling it for anyone else.
Missing days doesn't break it either. The story is cumulative rather than strictly sequential, so someone who's been in back-to-back meetings for a week can open four doors on Monday morning and be back in the argument by lunchtime. In practice that resilience is what keeps mid-December participation from collapsing.
What you have to do, and what you don't
Setup is one afternoon in November — pick a tier, add your company name, get the link, pin it as a tab. From 1 December, the running of it is optional: post the doors if you like doing it, and it'll run hotter; post nothing, and it still opens every morning and still names a winner on Christmas Eve.
The larger tiers include the comms kit, with the launch post, the mid-month nudge, the accusations message and the reveal already written for Teams and email. It's there so this doesn't turn into twenty-four pieces of copywriting for whoever drew the short straw.
Pin it to your channel on 1 December
No app to publish, no admin consent, no tenant changes. See what it costs and what your team gets.
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