Newbie setting up Microsoft Teams for a college - Teams or Channels?

[BJG]

...so, I'm working for a University department which is like a mini-school or college, with admin, subjects, management, etc.

 

It's all shifted online due to the pandemic, and they now want to shift over to Microsoft Teams which they haven't used before.

 

Me and a bunch of other staff have just had a presentation on it by the University. They've asked us how we want to organise it in terms of teams and channels; eg one master team with a bunch of channels, or a handful of different teams. They've said that once we go down one route it'll be awkward to change, and they'd like us to define the overall structure at the outset, but didn't clearly explain the difference, or how many different teams we should go for. (They'd clearly prefer as few as possible.)

 

They also suggested that, in the long term, the Teams file management system could ultimately replace the existing shared folder system, and again, that data was tricky to migrate if you started organising it in the wrong way.

 

So...I've now assured the baffled staff who took part in this meeting that I'll figure it out and let them know what's best.

 

Help!

 

What's people's opinions on a sensible system....? I'm not asking you to break it down into the details, but...can you see why we'd be better off with a single team, or why we'd need a handful to cover certain areas...? (I know very little about this yet, even basic stuff like whether staff could or should be in multiple teams, whether channels are hierarchical, and issues around private/confidential data...so assume nothing!)

Edited April 3, 2020 by BJG

[mavhc]

It is a bit odd, but mostly consider permissions, the clue is in the name, is everyone in the team part of a team? In general should they have read/write access to everything shared in that team?

[BJG]

One of the things that had people puzzled was the idea that the Teams file system could ultimately replace the shared folder system, and that's heavily permissions-based. There are broad divisions between office and teaching, and within those it's quite finely divided. I don't think that staff within one subject area can generally access files within another subject, for instance. Within the admin side there are private folders for accounts, SMT, IT etc. They were generally guiding us towards as few teams as possible though, preferably one, so...maybe the idea of replicating the shared folder and its assorted permissions within Teams is a red herring, I don't know how far we should be directed by that. And I'm not sure what advantages there are to limiting the number of teams. Edited April 3, 2020 by BJG

[DODICT]

I'd def go Teams - you can easily make people member of multiple Teams but when you have the whole organisation as a Team with just channels breaking it up I think some simple steps become more difficult.

 

Just notifying your 'team' to something - as a team you can immediately tag the team. as a channel you need to create tags and populate them so not a ready way to notify that channel.

 

Go teams and you can provide as much open access to all as you want really where as go channels and your stuck with everyone lumped in. We did the channel route for speed as a temp solution and on reflection the day it would take to populate our departments would have far preferable to some of the issues since. When launch to new people have felt a bit lost finding their channel - 'am I in the right place' - 'anyone there' - where as this would have been more straightforward with them sat in there own team.

[mavhc]

Is every team its own sharepoint thing? For the actual uploading of shared drives I'd make a new sharepoint thing instead, no need to link it to Teams

[TechMonkey]

For a Universtiy I would go for a team per course, with channels created by the teacher in charge for discussions, modules or seperating topics.

 

For the current remote learning we are going a Team per year with channels per subject, but we only offering a limited set of subjects and a pupil will be in every subject. Permissions are easier to manage at Team level than in Channels.

 

As for files, yes you can have all the course files in the team, a team has a Sharepoint site as well. It gives the course staff more visibility of their files and if they make it a horrible mess it only affects them. You could make a staff team and put staff files , policies, forms and the like, in there but a standard file library would probably suit better.

[Asgard]

We are a Sixth Form College and we went with a teams per course then created channels per class

 

The only issue we seem to regularly hit is assigning an assignment to a subset of the users you get hit with;

 

 

Also the assignments appear to only be in the main area and not within the channels - unless we have done something glaringly obvious incorrect

[BJG]

(...all very helpful, thanks...!)

[psydii]

Generally we already had a group per team in AD, and with that a DL and a folder on a shared drive. These mapped pretty neatly into a Team in Office 365. However We created the Teams initialy as Office365 Groups (to replace DL functionality) and then converted into Teams. If we created directly in Teams we lost the DL functionality by default.

 

Additionally some larger faculties needed a team per department /subject area. The smaller ones were happy enough the a channel per subject.

 

We migrated the shared folders into the Sharepoint site associated with the Team, and explained Channels to people. Because we needed people to adopt Teams in a hurry, we did not work through the process off adopting Channels as top level foders/containers for work-streams. This will likely bite us in the future. We put the SharePoint site's Document Library as a Tab in each 'migrated' team for easy access.

 

Each Class on the timetable has its own team and is built through SDS.

 

 

 

In terms of explaining it to people, I'd never managed to figure out a decent story that people (or I) could follow. The current crisis focused minds and I sold it as a space to meet and collaborate online with access to their team's files and folders.

[titch]

Generally we already had a group per team in AD, and with that a DL and a folder on a shared drive. These mapped pretty neatly into a Team in Office 365. However We created the Teams initialy as Office365 Groups (to replace DL functionality) and then converted into Teams. If we created directly in Teams we lost the DL functionality by default.

 

Additionally some larger faculties needed a team per department /subject area. The smaller ones were happy enough the a channel per subject.

 

We migrated the shared folders into the Sharepoint site associated with the Team, and explained Channels to people. Because we needed people to adopt Teams in a hurry, we did not work through the process off adopting Channels as top level foders/containers for work-streams. This will likely bite us in the future. We put the SharePoint site's Document Library as a Tab in each 'migrated' team for easy access.

 

Each Class on the timetable has its own team and is built through SDS.

 

 

 

In terms of explaining it to people, I'd never managed to figure out a decent story that people (or I) could follow. The current crisis focused minds and I sold it as a space to meet and collaborate online with access to their team's files and folders.

Out of interest did you manage to centrally add the SharePoint library or did you have to do it for each individual team?

[HPlum78]

@BJG I work in a Uni and this for my sins this is one of the areas I am involved in and have developed over the past 18 months or so, if you want some insights and want to go over the whole life cycle management piece then PM me I am happy to go over what we have done/ demo what we have in place. To sum up we use our ticketing system and users can request a team via the our helpdesk (they have to select what the team is for and select what the data category is based on the guide lines set out by our information security office (as certain data is not permitted in our Teams service - clinical trial data is one of these)) then we use Flow and PowerShell scripts to create the Team assign owners/ users and make sure that it meets the naming conventions and the likes. We also have scripts that check the Teams meet the criteria after they are created so for instance they have a minimum of 2 owners and some other bits that we keep a check on so that the Teams don't just stagnate over time, a number of people in the department spent a few weeks with the product group from MS developing our Teams service. So as for what makes a Team well they can follow the departmental or college structure but they are also good for those Teams that span across departments and colleges that's why we have ultimately let users control and drive the usage of Teams, we just have a service and lifecycle wrapper for it. Edited April 7, 2020 by HPlum78

[psydii]

Out of interest did you manage to centrally add the SharePoint library or did you have to do it for each individual team?

By hand. I only had around 30 or so to make over a period of several months, and they all also got bespoke welcome messages, and introductory emails with an little on-boarding banter to get them engaged.

 

@HPlum78 I would definitely be interested in taking a look at your processes around the lifecycle management of your Teams. I'll DM you when I've got clear of the backlog.

[MS2011]

@BJG I work in a Uni and this for my sins this is one of the areas I am involved in and have developed over the past 18 months or so, if you want some insights and want to go over the whole life cycle management piece then PM me I am happy to go over what we have done/ demo what we have in place. To sum up we use our ticketing system and users can request a team via the our helpdesk (they have to select what the team is for and select what the data category is based on the guide lines set out by our information security office (as certain data is not permitted in our Teams service - clinical trial data is one of these)) then we use Flow and PowerShell scripts to create the Team assign owners/ users and make sure that it meets the naming conventions and the likes. We also have scripts that check the Teams meet the criteria after they are created so for instance they have a minimum of 2 owners and some other bits that we keep a check on so that the Teams don't just stagnate over time, a number of people in the department spent a few weeks with the product group from MS developing our Teams service. So as for what makes a Team well they can follow the departmental or college structure but they are also good for those Teams that span across departments and colleges that's why we have ultimately let users control and drive the usage of Teams, we just have a service and lifecycle wrapper for it.

 

Hi HPlum78

 

We have setup teams as well and I want to configure properly from day one. Would it be possible you to share your management document with me ?

 

Thanks

MS

[mavhc]

A recent advert for Teams suggested a channel could be a project, something you'd read from the start of if you joined the project late

[jmak]

One of the things that had people puzzled was the idea that the Teams file system could ultimately replace the shared folder system, and that's heavily permissions-based. There are broad divisions between office and teaching, and within those it's quite finely divided. I don't think that staff within one subject area can generally access files within another subject, for instance. Within the admin side there are private folders for accounts, SMT, IT etc. They were generally guiding us towards as few teams as possible though, preferably one, so...maybe the idea of replicating the shared folder and its assorted permissions within Teams is a red herring, I don't know how far we should be directed by that. And I'm not sure what advantages there are to limiting the number of teams.

From this post early on, I can't see a single Team being the best option for users.

 

Lots of other good advice above - and I didn't see anyone advocating using Channels as the way of dividing up content/users.

 

Did your university give any reason for why they weren't keen on multiple Teams?

[mavhc]

One question is how does the UI scale when you have 1000 teams, can't use a hierarchy, correct? Can you filter a list in real time as you type? Once you get to the 100 team level you need a naming convention to be enforced.

[Anonymous2000]

I would go Teams for say a subject, then channels within that.

[mavhc]

A team per class/subject/year seems good, then a channel per lesson/topic.

 

Team = Physics 2020 J8

Channel = Lesson 1/Lesson 2020-04-19. Instructions for lesson in the channel, video stream in channel, discussion in channel, assignments.

Then if you miss a lesson you just read that whole channel. And next year you just copy and paste the instructions and video stream and the teacher can just sit back and realise they've been made obsolete.

[mrstrong]

I find this very frustrating that a huge organisation like MS can't provide better guidance on

best practice (in general and not just teams / office 365). About the best I could find was

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/get-started-with-teams-create-your-first-teams-and-channels

and also

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/best-practices-for-school-leaders-creating-teams-and-channels-in-microsoft-teams-for-education-f3663ad9-a835-4971-9acb-6725a543c003

 

What I'd like to have is a set of detailed tutorials e.g. for a typical primary school a typical secondary school

that covers every step, right down to names of teams and channels to create etc.

[mavhc]

Start a google doc for us to edit together, for maximum irony

[MS2011]

Dear all

 

We got exchange onprem and I have created a tenant in office 365 to setup teams.

 

I have verified the domain using txt record. We are not moving to office 365 email now.

 

How do I setup teams tenancy to sync to directory service to keep users and class groups up to date.

 

Thanks

[MS2011]

Do I need to sync via Mis or directory service?