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I am using Salamander free. The Office365 class groups are created and the class teacher is added as the owner but no students are being added to the group. Within Teams when the teacher tries to look for the O365 group of course this reports as empty. They can add the students manually. I had been under the impression that The O365 group would be populated with students leaving them to add students to the Team by searching for the O365 group. Found this on the Salamander site From 26th March 2020 – SDS will still create the Office 365 Group and add the teacher and students. However, the Microsoft SDS process will no longer create Teams. Teachers will need to manually create their Class Teams and add Students. These can be done by searching for and selecting the Class Office 365 Group, during the class team setup process. You will not need to add students one by one. Any thoughts? Thanks Ern

Hi, Just after some feedback / suggestions from other schools using Office365 / Microsoft Teams in relation to the naming convention used for staff and students alike. When we on-boarded Staff (only), their 'display name' was used as their name (e.g. ) which worked great and we could clearly see which member of staff / person it was etc. Now, with onboarding Students, it is clear that the continued use of the and naming convention for Staff accounts (for Students to see) is not suitable. Therefore, I am working on the basis that it should possibly follow for staff (display) name? The downside to this, is that everyone's 2- letter initials within Teams etc, will all be 'M' (for Mrs. Mr. Ms. Miss etc) followed by their initial. So in turn, when staff are communicating within Teams, and they just want to mention certain members of staff, It will just truncate to 'M'. I assume that ultimately this is how (it can only) work? Our students will be using a different sub-domain (student.) though I have seen some posts suggesting that their student display names are prefixed with 'Student' for ease of identification. Again, is the common / good practice? I just want to prepare our Local AD correctly, in readiness to sync via AD Connect / SalamanderSoft etc before onboarding over 1,000 accounts! Thanks in advance.

Good morning all, Is anybody else experiencing a problem where users in Microsoft Teams have suddenly lost access to the Class Notebook tab in their class Teams? It looks like the One Note is still available and if I copy and paste the url from a working user and then try and access that url as the broken user, it opens up asolutetly fine. Nothing appears to have changed in terms of Teams permissions and at first Microsoft said lots of school had started to report it. Now i'm getting emails asking me to run packet captures at my end which either makes me think it's not a wider issue as first discussed or are they just using me to help them troubleshoot a bigger problem.. Cheers, Jonny

Hi all, Microsoft Teams has been very useful to everyone for the past few years. Recently though (not sure if it is due to a new Windows 11 update) the Microsoft store version of Teams has been installing on the IT Suite computers. I am trying to work out if it is per user or not but regardless it is a pain. Worst thing is that it installs the home/small business which is useless as we need the work or school version. Just wanted to ask if anyone has any ideas of how to disable the Microsoft Store Teams app from Windows 11. Thanks,

I can't believe I've never noticed this before - but someone has just pointed it out... In Class Teams > Class Notebook, if a student inserts a file to a page, and opts to 'Upload to OneDrive and Insert link' the following happens: The file is uploaded to a folder in the Team's Document library (and not OneDrive) at all Permission to this file are set individually - inheritance is broken EVERYONE in the Team (owners and members) are granted edit rights to that file This is madness - why have a system which provides secure sections within the Notebook, and then grant full rights to linked attachments to the world and its mother? Here's a quick demo of what I mean - I can confirm that other students have full edit rights to this file. Has anyone else noticed this? What do you do about it? Have I missed a setting somewhere? Thoughts appreciated.

We have a couple of pupils not able to view their Teams in the iPad Teams app, but can see them when logged into Teams via Chrome on a Windows desktop. The rest of the class access their teams via the iPad app. I've tried all the usual clearing app data, signing out/back in, reinstalling the iPad app, to no avail. These two pupils can see a couple of Teams from last academic year on their iPads, but not the ones from the current academic year. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Thank you. James

Hello, I've been working to find a way to opt out an email address from Teams weekly digest and have finally come up with a manageable solution that I thought I'd share. We have SIMS for our MIS and Salamander Active Directory provisioning Teams Classes and Parent data via the Microsoft SDS sync. Salamander creates nightly uploads of the SDS csv file set and they offer this for free using their tool here... https://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/free-utilities/salamander-for-school-data-sync/ This fix is for those that have an automated SDS sync upload rather than the free run-once option. The problem: A parent contacts the school to say that they do not want to receive the Microsoft Teams weekly digest email. You need to keep the email in the MIS for other systems. The Microsoft SDS already has the parent email address and it's only possible to remove the email from the Azure Active Directory by using the reset_guardians.ps1 script provided here: https://github.com/OfficeDev/O365-EDU-Tools/blob/master/SDS%20Scripts/Reset-Guardians.ps1 Once you reset the guardian contacts for a student, all of the contacts are removed from the student, not just the one that wish to opt out. The other contacts for the student do not automatically reappear on the next csv file upload and it's only possible to get the contact data back again if you run a Full Sync reset on the SDS profile - something that cannot be automated (at the time of writing this). Removing an individual is possible via PowerShell if you read into the script. You can adjust the contact array on the student object in the graph data to contain what you want manually or via a script. However that's not so easy for your admin/data/pastoral teams to manage themselves and would be an administrative headache for any IT Support Team. A simple solution: Rather than thinking about removing the parent from the student contacts on the Azure object, we can simply update the email address to a new value instead. The SDS sync process will push changes to values and add new values but will not remove them. So all we need to do is flag the contact in the MIS and have the process replace the email with a non existent one that will bounce. Simple! For our setup we added a User Defined Field in SIMS in the Contacts data set. I called ours "NoTeamsEmail" and set it as a True/False type value. I then asked Salamander to add the new "NoTeamsEmail" UDF to the parent data extract, and use the value of the field to determine what the email address will be in the users.csv file creation workflow for SDS. The logic is that if the value of "NoTeamsEmail" field in SIMS is set to True (ticked) by the school's staff, Salamander will use a fixed value of "[email protected]" instead of the actual parent email address. SDS will then process this change when the files upload and the parent will no longer be receive the weekly email. Note: The email address you choose should be at your own school domain or a domain that you control to ensure that it is never going to exist. This works in any automation on SDS if you can identify the parent/guardian users somehow and just replace their email in the process if they are flagged. Thank you to Salamander who have implemented this for us - developers changed their SDS process to accommodate it. Top marks Thanks, Chris

Hi, Does anyone know what license is required to create Live events in MS Teams? We have Office Pro Plus license but when try to schedule a live event we get an error message say, invalid license. Thanks

Ok. I give up! How on earth does one disable calling for students in Teams? As it stands, a student can click 'Meet Now' and start their own audio or video chat, and I don't want them to be able to. Nothing I'm doing with policies in the Teams Admin Centre seems to be making any difference - I'm guessing these only apply to scheduled meetings... Has anyone done it?

Hi everyone, I've done a quick review on a desk phone for Microsoft Teams as I noticed there was no review showing how it works, the setup process and the features compared to the Windows client and mobile device clients. I hope this video helps you to take a decision if a desk phone makes sense for your business or your customers as there is still a lot of people that want to stick with a physical phone, but have to move to a more modern platform like Microsoft Teams. Please drop me any feedback you may have here or on the Youtube video, I would really appreciate your thoughts so I can improve my tutorials and videos going forward

Hi We're using MS Teams to deliver live lessons within school which is working somewhat well. I've recently disabled Anonymous access within the Teams admin center to prevent anonymous users joining meetings using the meeting URLs - There were some students joining with offensive names. Having done this any external users our SLT or teachers invite to a meeting are struggling to join. The process I am using is as follows; 1. Create a guest user in Azure Active Directory. 2. Guest user accepts the invite to join the Org via the email invitation. 3. Ask the user to create their meeting using the New Meeting button within Teams, selecting the guest user created in Azure. 4. Guest clicks the Join meeting button within the meeting invitation email. However, when the guest user clicks Join meeting and enters their name they are greeted by a message that says they aren't part of the org Does anyone know how to prevent this? If you press the Dismiss button it just closes the screen and does nothing. However if you create a meeting without inviting a guest user and paste the meeting link into a browser you see the same message, if you press dismiss it then asks you to sign in. I am assuming it's displaying this message as it doesn't know what Org the user is part of. Does anyone have any ideas?

I stupidly created a new profile before archiving last year's profile which meant that many teams have been filled with this year's and last year's students. Example, 8A-EN1 has students from both last year's 8A-EN1 and this year's 8A-EN1. I have expired the new profile in hope that I could get the new students out however when running the section cleanup, it fails and does nothing. So do you know the answer to these questions: Any ideas how we can get the teams back to how they were so we can archive them then pull in our new data? Do we need to expire the old profile to make the section cleanup work? Is there a way of getting the new students out?

Hi, Does anyone know if there's a way to reject handed in work via the assignments tab. We have a few students that are deliberately sending blank documents. Thanks David

Microsoft just released the first version of Teams client for linux after so much demand andcountless requests by the community. How does it stack up against the Windowsversion? Is it any good?

Hello everyone We are beginning to deploy Teams, Salamander and SDS and I have a few questions - can anyone shed some light on them please? If a student moves group, will they will be removed from one team and added to another? How does this affect any work they have done in OneNote? Is the data transferred? Can the data be transferred? Does it disappear? What about at the end of each academic year? Fanx peeps

Hello, My setting are asking about the best way to store Computing curriculum evidence and pupil work, for example an Ofsted inspection with a deep dive in to ICT. In my 5 years here, the first 2 were spent using Windows laptops and roaming profiles. Easy peasy. Since 2017/18, the school have been using Google Classroom, however since then, the school, SLT, Computing lead etc. have ​never​ asked for central storage/evidence of ICT work. Until now as they're flapping about inspection. Therefore after each academic year, Google Classroom's were archived, and the subsequent google accounts for school leavers get deleted, also meaning their work has unfortunately disappeared. (unless google drive data has been backed up). (teething problems/learning curve of GSuite!). My question is; How do you do it?

Hi All, I've been at a few conferences lately with speakers suggesting that you should choose "either" Google or Microsoft in your institution / mat and stick with it. My take of this really is they are saying "Choose microsoft" as if your organisation talks to anyone else or sends anything anywhere they tend to need a microsoft format in some form or other. We work in a hybrid way but are thinking about changing this split, hence this post. Currently :- 3-18 We have given departments complete autonomy on choosing the best tools for their department. This has led to a bit of a mixed economy for pupils, so we are looking to guide more. All Staff have a Chromebook and access any microsoft services via a remote sessions and remote working. Some Teaching Staff have a Windows PC on their desk at the front of classroom or, 3-11 and Maths (Promethean) , DT (Sketchup, 2D Design), Music (Sibelius),Art (Photoshop) USB-c Dock and use their Chromebook if not above for all other departments. Office Only staff have a Windows PC for their day to day job. (SIMS Finance and HR all spit out Microsoft based files for working on) Email GMail 3-11 Pupils can access a PC or Chromebook or iPad depending on the task at hand and age of the pupil. 11-18 Pupils - 1-1 Chromebook Post 16 Pupils 1-1 Chromebook and BYOD option MACs for Music Production. (Garage Band and Logic) We have a VLE for "curriculum resource" and Intranet style functions. Google - Curriculum Facing resources and contact with pupils. Anyone who has asked can have a "Google Shared Drive" so is used for Management and Microsoft - Back office functions etc. Windows on site for shared drives, though we have moved home drives to OneDrive. The migration away from "Windows Shared Drives" to the next cloud based iteration is where we are thinking where do we draw the line for clarity? Along with many others the reason is cost reduction and improved remote access to resources. (To a large extent we will be able to remove our remote desktop solution). Streamlined ways of working with Power Automate or Google Apps Script How do you split and guide staff on what to use where, and where is the split? Do we jump to more google for the online services OR fire up teams and sharepoint? We could say all T&L is google and Back office is Microsoft, but what about reports on pupil performance? Is that "Google or Microsoft"? Just thinking about what others do and how do you do it? Where is your split? I'm not imagining a future where we are all one or the other as I think that does close the door on great functions either side. John

Hi All, As part of our ongoing commitment to our partner schools, Joskos has opened up our Online Platform  training  for all staff to attend whenever they like – as many times as they like. These workshops provide a taster of what is possible in Microsoft Teams from a teaching and learning perspective and cover the following: Navigate Microsoft Teams Post announcements and materials   Assign student classwork and homework assignments Provide feedback and mark student work Set up secure virtual lessons The workshop is designed for teachers who are new to Google Classroom or would like a refresher. The workshop is free for all schools in the UK and will be hosted on Wednesdays at 3:45PM to 5:15PM every week until the 24rd March 2021. Register your interest to the event and purchase your free ticket with the link below: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/microsoft-teams-essentials-workshop-tickets-135716091483 We look forward to seeing you, Joskos

Hi all, We have the Teams Machine MSI installed through group policy. However I am struggling to see how we update it. I've read stuff around how the exe updates itself but there is not a lot of the machine msi and updates. We don't seem to get anything installed into appdata folder however in our c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Teams on each machine there is an Update.exe The only thing we are doing is deleting the Teams regkey from HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run as that was the only way we found of stopping it auto launching. Any ideas would be appreciated, Just want to know the best way of having up to date teams.