Microsoft Teams rights

[penfold]

Disclaimer - this is not education based but private work. But as I see a lot of posts on Teams here I need some clarification and I guess this is something that lots of people are dealing with right now.

 

I have never used Teams but my wife is trying to use it for teaching. They have brought this into use but have no document to refer to for how anyone should be using it. What my wife wants to have is her own team which she is owner of so she can add members to the group she is trying to teach. This is being used to teach adults who have a varied set of IT Skills so if she has access to manage her own team it would be really helpful. Except for my wife, all members will be guests with their own personal email accounts.

 

Originally she was told that she could not be a team owner as there is cost involved so it has to go through the company. Now she is told that she will be able to add guest members (as a member of a private chat) once they have signed up. From what I have read it is possible to make someone a Team owner who can then add & remove guests and allow them to access files etc. She is now asking me as it seems there is someone who is managing this as a "man-in-the-middle" to the IT support they have. I think there is some confusion of what is possible and what they want to do. I'm trying to understand so I can help her set up what she needs to teach.

 

Can anyone clarify how teams should be set up so you can allow someone to be be able to manage their own team (add & remove Users) add content and allow others to access and leave chat messages as well as arrange calls? Is there additional costs involved in allowing more people to do this.

 

Primarily I'm trying to work out if this is a limitation of what they are paying for or lack of knowledge in setting it up properly. As not being able to do this in teams means that she cannot teach. I am looking for a brief overview as I think this is being rolled out in a rush and looks like it is more complicated than it should be.

 

 

Many thanks

[tapb]

With the little detail you've provided, yes all these scenarios are possible for free with Office 365 A1, subject to whatever organisational and IT policies.

Here's some free resources for education for remote learning our company have put together with Microsoft (and Google), I'm aware they don't go into the full guest scenario you've mentioned

https://tablet-academy.com/covid-19/

https://microsoftevent.eventbuilder.com/event/15597

If the tech team needs upskilling here is one of a number of free webinars for IT Pro's in education:

https://tablet-academy.com/microsoft-365-technical-roadshow/

 

We can provide a range of additional training and support if you need it

[penfold]

Thanks I'll forward the links to my wife. I realise that there is not much information I provided. But it looks to me like they got Teams in Feb but have rushed it out now to try and keep some teaching going without looking at how to set it up. The problem is that when my wife is talking to people she doesn't know how it will work as the instructions don't seem to be correct.

 

It looks like today they have created a private chat room where my wife can invite members now. To me it just seems like they are trying to centrally micro manage how it is being used, but as a result no one is able to access the resources without going through lots of requests to 1 person. I would have thought that you could give someone permissions to manage their own team/area without having to pay extra.

[internetuser]

You can set owners for team channels. If it is been rushed in. I suspect they will be learning it as they go along.

 

If admin can create a teams channel, then grant an owner so they can create teams with in this channel.

 

What they don’t want from day zero is people going rouge and creating millions of channels and teams.

[penfold]

Just a quick update to close this up. It looks like they had not set this up properly. Only 1 person is the owner of the Teams channel and they are creating channels for others. They are also the admin and approving access for "guests" to join the correct groups. To me it looks like they don't (didn't) know how to set it up and because of a relatively low number of interested students they had decided that it would be managed by 1 person. This caused a great deal of stress in getting people connected and setup with the right access but it looks like most access is sorted now.

 

So I have put it down rushing the rollout and not knowing how they wanted to use it and lack of instructions for people trying to use it. For now, it seems like people can access it and use it to teach. Thanks for all your feedback

[tapb]

Thanks for the update. That makes sense. There's a lot more to getting people to use a tool than just giving it to them!