What's the deal with Teams these days...?

[Koldov]

After school today I received an email from a member of SLT saying that one of teachers has a university assessment on Wednesday.

 

The strange thing is they have asked the teacher to create a Teams link for the professional discussion...

 

We don't use Teams as a school although we do kind of have an O365 tenant (not used in anger though) so I guess it's possible.

 

Years ago I made the effort to install it for the one or two users that needed it, but since then I've told them to use the web version as mostly it was just joining other people's meetings.

 

So, I looked into deployment and it got a bit confusing. Teams classic or new, msi or exe, machine wide or user install...?

 

I guess that although the teachers laptops are quite locked down, the per user 'appdata' install gets around that and won't need admin, so do I just create them as a user on our O365 tenant and let them get on with it?

 

Or is it just easier to use the web version to create a Teams meeting link?

 

At least I got a whole days notice, which is better than the usual 5 minutes, or we need this now...

Edited December 11, 2023 by Koldov

[CrootUK]

We deploy teams in the Office 365 package, you can enable on your custom xml using config.office.com

 

if you’d rather not reinstall office then deploying the machine wide install should work.

 

Even with teams installed, still find lots of user using the web version and they don’t complain about it.

[free780]

You can just use the web client. Other than that use the new client from the ms store.

[Koldov]

Yeah I'd just done a little bit of 'research' (I'm not spending too much of my evening worrying about it though, just wanting to get a bit of a head start) and found a post that seemed to suggest it's quite a mission to schedule/create a meeting link on the web version...

 

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/how-to-create-a-teams-meeting-in-outlook-web-app/ebf6d7fb-1495-4134-9e84-79f8cce9c76a

[Boredguy]

MS are currently rolling out the "New" Teams to most tenancies for Jan, so the old Machine Wide installer for "Classic" isn't going to be much use soon.

 

Nothing wrong with just using the web version if your not using Teams on a day to day basis.

[Olliedawg]

You could use the machine wide installer to deploy the "classic" teams now. Come next early next year, if you are running the classic version, you will automatically receive an update to the new version of teams.

 

Deploying the new version of Teams seems to be a bit more of a job than the classic one, as they dont offer a .msi package

[ITGuyNW]

Has anyone found they've been moved over to the web version of Teams and cannot switch multiple accounts?

[robintech]

Confusingly there is now New Web Teams and Classic Web Teams

https://teams.microsoft.com/v2/

[ITGuyNW]

I was hoping the new web version would allow account switching but it seems not

[Alis_Klar]

From WikiPedia

Microsoft Teams is a web-based desktop app, originally developed on top of the Electron framework from GitHub which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript platform. Version 2.0 was rebuilt using the Evergreen version of Microsoft Edge WebView2 in place of Electron.

If it's a browser app in a wrapper why does it behave differently to the webapp? Are there any UI differences?

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/microsoft-teams-advantages-of-the-new-architecture/ba-p/3775704

Edited December 19, 2023 by Alis_Klar