Blocking students from contacting certain members of staff on Teams

[rickjames]

Morning all,

 

We had an email passed onto us from last week where a student had both sent IMs and tried calling our University Secretary and Vice-Chancellor on Teams.

 

Since this, we're wondering about what exactly we can put in place to prevent this from happening again and stopping students from contacting a particular set of staff (Govenors, HoCs, VCs etc); the only thing that I can think of that is possible would be to use Information Barriers and then a Scoped Directory Search, but this appears to require an A5 subscription (we are mostly A1 with a small amount of A3). And from also looking at the requirements, it's also a hell of a lot of work.

 

Apart from the above, is there anything else we can do to achieve this? Setting up a messaging policy to prevent private chat for all students isn't feasible, and simply put I can't see anything obvious that would work. Hiding users doesn't seem to be a thing either...

 

Cheers

Edited November 9, 2020 by rickjames

[mavhc]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/information-barriers-in-teams

 

Does look like you'd need A5, or one of the other subscriptions in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/information-barriers?view=o365-worldwide#required-licenses-and-permissions

 

Looks like Microsoft 365 A5 Compliance would be what you want, the E5 version is $10/user/month, wonder how many users you need it for.

 

https://www.cloudworkbench.com/product/microsoft-365-a5-compliance-for-faculty/ has it for €2.36

 

It seems that you need the licences for people you want to block, so A can't talk to B requires A to have a licence.

 

But B can't talk to A requires B to have a licence.

 

So you'd want to licence students, not staff.

Edited November 9, 2020 by mavhc