Microsoft Teams - End of Year Procedures

[mattpant]

Hi All,

 

As the title suggests, does anybody have a plan or knowledge of what we should be doing to prep for the end of school year when using Microsoft Teams? We are using Teams / Sync'ed from SIMS with SDS with the Free Salamander SDS utility.

 

What should we do about GCSE Classes / A and AS Classes that are two year courses which ideally we would want to keep going, so although the classname would roll up from Year 10 to Year 11, or Year 12 to 13, it's actually the same class, so all material / classnotes etc would remain?

 

Thanks,

 

Matt

[supportman]

I ask all teachers to back up their work (just in case) and teams should be treated as temporary.

 

Saying that, as long as the timetable names do not change they should persist the next year with all the new students (or existing ones)

 

The important thing to remember is the SDS end of year process will expire any classes that do not exist on your Sims timetable any more. This caught us out once but has been smooth last year.

 

Any non existing classes will have EXP_ added to their names and be archived as well as the data by the SDS end of year process, they are not deleted until you run a powershell script.

[FragglePete]

For us, I've made it clear that I'll be clearing out a lot of the Teams made by Teachers at the end of the academic year - most were made adhoc for remote learning and while staff got to grips with it (I've got a lot of 'Test' teams!). I have since managed to get SDS working, and Staff are now creating 'section' Teams generated by this but at the moment it's a bit of a mess. But, manageable at the moment. Not much has been attached to our Teams, just really used for online lessons so clearing these down shouldn't be an issue. I hope from September to have it a little bit more under control but this will be down to staff training, etc with only being able to create Teams generated by SDS or manually by IT Support.

 

I did notice there is an ability to delete Teams that it deems as 'expired', as in, not had any activity for x number of days which would be useful - but, this does appear to require the premium license on your tenant to be able to enable. But, I guess a suitable Powershell script could do something similar run periodically to delete teams that have not had any activity? Something I'll look at some point.

 

Pete

[mattpant]

For us, I've made it clear that I'll be clearing out a lot of the Teams made by Teachers at the end of the academic year - most were made adhoc for remote learning and while staff got to grips with it (I've got a lot of 'Test' teams!). I have since managed to get SDS working, and Staff are now creating 'section' Teams generated by this but at the moment it's a bit of a mess. But, manageable at the moment. Not much has been attached to our Teams, just really used for online lessons so clearing these down shouldn't be an issue. I hope from September to have it a little bit more under control but this will be down to staff training, etc with only being able to create Teams generated by SDS or manually by IT Support.

 

I did notice there is an ability to delete Teams that it deems as 'expired', as in, not had any activity for x number of days which would be useful - but, this does appear to require the premium license on your tenant to be able to enable. But, I guess a suitable Powershell script could do something similar run periodically to delete teams that have not had any activity? Something I'll look at some point.

 

Pete

 

Thanks - I tried to avoid staff being able to setup their own Ad-Hoc classes in Teams by removing their permissions so I don't end up with lots of "Test" teams - or random one off teams - there's only myself and 1 or 2 others that can manually create a new team. All the others were created by SDS.

 

Was just trying to get a heads up on what we are likely to need to do before the time arrives (Which really won't be all that too far away scarily!)

[FragglePete]

Thanks - I tried to avoid staff being able to setup their own Ad-Hoc classes in Teams by removing their permissions so I don't end up with lots of "Test" teams - or random one off teams - there's only myself and 1 or 2 others that can manually create a new team. All the others were created by SDS.

 

Was just trying to get a heads up on what we are likely to need to do before the time arrives (Which really won't be all that too far away scarily!)

 

That will be my intention in the future - it's just what we had to do in the current situation and we do have a lot of 'random' teams. But, it's ok at the moment.

 

Pete