Forum Discussion
Create and update teams
I work in a high school with 1000 students and we would like to use MS educational teams as these teams already offers support for class NoteBooks. We need to able to automatically create and update these teams using data stored in another system.
Therefore I have two questions:
1. When will the API change status from beta to an actual release?
2. I can see that the release of the API has been a request from many users for more than a year. Does anyone have experince with using the current API (beta)? Do you often have problems with the API and need to rewrite code and so on?
3 Replies
Hi Jacob
To answer your question the following APIs should reach General Availability this summer, as announced on Build: creating and deleting teams and channels; adding and remove team members and owners; and updating team and channel properties.
That said most education environments don't need to develop against the APIs to create and update teams, have you looked into https://sds.microsoft.com/? It currently supports more than 80 Student Information Systems. Since it doesn't support ours we had a small component custom made that parses the IMS export and translates it into the six CSVs required by SDS. You can read more about this on my blog https://teams.rocks/2018/04/04/automate-teams-for-education-with-school-data-sync/.
The latest version of the https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/MicrosoftTeams/0.9.3 (0.9.3, in beta) now also supports creating new teams based on EDU templates, so there could be multiple ways to reach your goal here.Hi Magmus
Thank you for that very useful information. I already have passed this on to our development section and they are looking at it right now.
When I talk to them I get the impression that they for some reason prefer working with the API instead of SDS. Therefore I would like to ask you about what to expect of changes in the APIs from now and until summer. Now that summer is very close would you expect any changes to the APIs so that development of scrips will be a waste of time?
I know that the development section is very concerned about this based on their experience last year with microsoft classroom, which was just taken off over night as Microsoft implemented the education teams into teams instead.
