Will we definitely have a fully operational version of Teams for edu in July 2017?

[Llywelyn Morgan]

Our school needs to decide whether or not to progress with Teams as a viable alternative to Classroom, or to fall back on Teacher Dashboard.

Our main concern (especially since the announcement of abondoning Classroom) is that features such as class notebook, assignments, gradebook and student permission controls will not be available in advance of the new academic year (September 2017).

Please could somebody at MS clarify what will be available to edu users and when this will be rolled out.

Much appreciated.

[#2]

Looping  @Mike Tholfsen, 

[#3]

We should have everything you need fully ready in MS Teams (including the full and completed OneNote integration with Assignments) by the beginning of August. We will have many other aspects of Teams in EDU ready earlier than that.

[#4]

Thanks @Mike Tholfsen.  Looking forward to trying the new MS Teams when it comes out.

@Llywelyn Morgan

[#5]

Fully agree with this question. Surprised about abandoning Classroom, thats the way we tried to walk the last few months. Can anyone confirm this information,

[#6]

Hi Mike
Are there any plans to come up with a name for the education version of Teams other than "Teams"? A class is not a team in the business sense- its more like a group, but since Groups already exists in O365 that's not a starter. It will be a hard sell for me to get our teachers on board with a new thing called Teams when 'Classroom' said it all.

Cheers

John

[#7]

I liked the Classroom app.  The name was right and it was an excellent assignment management tool!  It just worked!

I have been testing MSTeams in  class environment and I would say that it works very well as centralized collaboration tool.    I also like the fact that you can bring in other connectors and tabs (Kahoot, powerapps, youtube, stream etc) - very useful when working on projects that require external references or tools.

It made sense to expand MSTeams in the Education Sector to include "Assignments" (Classroom) so that instead of having two underlying groups (one for MS Teams and another for Classroom) we would just have one underlying O365 group.

I haven't tested the new MS Teams (with Classroom).  It is not yet rolled out.

As far as naming is concerned, should Microsoft have retained Classroom and provided a means to add MSTeams features to it?  That way, MS Teams would be for general groups within the Education Sector e.g. Teams of Teachers, Teams for Clubs etc  and Classroom would be specific to the Classes.

Maybe or Maybe not?

@John@Llywelyn Morgan; @Mike Tholfsen