School Data Sync (SDS) and Microsoft Teams

[saintoctopus]

Hello everyone

 

We are beginning to deploy Teams, Salamander and SDS and I have a few questions - can anyone shed some light on them please?

 

• If a student moves group, will they will be removed from one team and added to another?
  
• How does this affect any work they have done in OneNote?
  
• Is the data transferred?
  
• Can the data be transferred?
  
• Does it disappear?
  
• What about at the end of each academic year?
  

 

Fanx peeps

[woody]

If a student moves group, will they will be removed from one team and added to another? Yes

How does this affect any work they have done in OneNote? The work stays in the team and they loose access to it.

Is the data transferred? No, it stays where it is.

Can the data be transferred? At the moment, files could be saved locally by the user and then re-saved in the new team if necessary - other content I'm not so sure.

Does it disappear? The teams continue to exist until they are removed manually (by powershell for instance). Since a team must have one owner, then at the moment even if a teacher is removed from a class at the end of the year for example, they would remain as owner of the team and therefore would keep access to it. However, they would soon build up a lot of historical teams at that rate! Also you get a lot of errors against the SDS profile for all these teams where the csv files no longer contain an entry linking a teacher to a class but it can't remove the last owner.

What about at the end of each academic year? Student loses access. Last teacher connected to the team retains access. Lots of errors against a profile in SDS!

 

I am not sure what happens with Onenote and class notebook within these teams.

 

Basically, Microsoft are stuck to some degree because they are limited by the logic under the hood with Teams and O365 groups. What we need is need an archiving solution and also the ability to easily transfer content between teams (the channels). For instance, perhaps a teacher could set up there own Team 'templates', which could then be used to copy content from the template into the class teams set up by SDS. At the end of an Academic year (or if a teacher moves mid year), the old teams should archived with a way for the teacher to get access to them.

 

Another scenario I am currently grappling with is when classes rotate around teachers during the year on a carousel in the timetable. I'm sure staff would want to retain access to the Teams for each class they have taught that year, as well as be able to transfer work contained in channels from one team to the other.

 

Until this happens, the workload imposed upon teachers in manually copying content somewhere local, them uploading it back into another team will mean only a few will truly embrace it. Either that or teachers use it to only enhance lessons with content that is not essential to the outcomes of the students and is unique to each class - ie Chat.

 

Assignments is another area I haven't fully investigated here - that's next on my list.

 

If anyone has any comments / advancements / corrections on the above, I would love to hear what they are and that my current conclusions where incorrect - that there was a better way to do things!

[woody]

As an update, you can copy folders / files on the File tab under any Channel to another Channel within the same Team, or another Team you have access to whether this be within your tenancy or if you are guest on another tenancy.

[psydii]

FWIW you can sync a Team to local storage using OneDrive, as they are fundamentally Sharepoint sites with a mailbox and SfB group chat rolled into a unified view.

 

I think that Teams might work well as the location for transient work (I’m thinking particularly about chat and notebooks here), but the core materials should be stored outside in more traditional Sharepoint site collections.

[saintoctopus]

Hmmm...so close and yet so far with Teams, eh?

 

I think that Teams might work well as the location for transient work (I’m thinking particularly about chat and notebooks here), but the core materials should be stored outside in more traditional Sharepoint site collections.

@psydii Totally agree - just wish one could control access to, say, the files Tab in Teams... can see files ending up in obscure places again...

 

Until this happens, the workload imposed upon teachers in manually copying content somewhere local, them uploading it back into another team will mean only a few will truly embrace it. Either that or teachers use it to only enhance lessons with content that is not essential to the outcomes of the students and is unique to each class - ie Chat.

@woody - yeah...dammit!

[saintoctopus]

FYI - Salamander answered with the following:

 

If a student moves group, will they will be removed from one team and added to another?

Yes, they should be removed from their old class and added to the new one.

 

How does this affect any work they have done in OneNote?

Their section group in ClassNotebook should stay as is in the old class and they should get a section in the new ClassNotebook

 

Is the data transferred?

No

 

Can the data be transferred?

Not automatically no.

 

Does it disappear?

No

 

What about at the end of each academic year?

The Teams are kept as is, and new ones are created for the new academic year's class groups.

[rfakes]

So touching on the fact that in a new academic year, if a team no longer exists (in the CSV files), the old Team will still remain - how do you go about doing housekeeping and removing those old teams?