Teams Final Tweaks

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

We're in the process of deploying Teams for live lessons. We're doing this with two year groups in July as a proof of concept for a whole School rollout in September, should it be necessary.

 

So far it's going really well. We've done several live lessons as part of our internal testing with our key worker pupils.

 

We've applied policy packages and tweaked these to our requirements, and I'm 90% happy with it, however there's a few bits I would like to get nailed if possible. Can anyone help with the following?

 

1. Is it possible for the meeting recording to start automatically, rather than teachers having to initiate this process? We'd only want this within our class teams, not in normal calls or non-class teams

2. Is it possible to get students to join as attendees by default, rather than the teacher having to set the meeting presenter preferences to 'me only' on each lesson

3. I've changed the policy package so that chat is off within meetings for students, but this has no effect? The only way it seems I can achieve this is to change the channel settings in each team so that only owners can post. This is fine for now but we might want students to post in the channel in future, but not chat in the meetings

4. Is there a Powershell command available to set channel settings so that only owners can post? Or is this only a GUI setting? Hoping for a speedy alternative to doing this manually on several hundred Teams!

5. Is it possible for background blur to be turned on by default for all meetings initiated by a Teacher?

6. Is it possible to stop students creating their own teams? I can't see anything in the policy packages for this. Can it be done with a normal policy, and if so can I use normal policies and packages in tandem?

7. Does anyone else find the raise hand feature isn't always available? I've never had it appear yet for a student, and it will sometimes appear for staff

 

We could happily launch in our current state, but I'd like it to be as slick as possible. You can probably guess that for most of these points, what I'm trying to do is reduce the amount of steps Teachers have to remember for every meeting!

 

Any help from Teams experts on here would be greatly appreciated!