Microsoft Teams Top Questions Answered
Published Mar 15 2017 09:31 AM 16.4K Views
Microsoft

We're excited about yesterday's global launch of Microsoft Teams. I'm Karuana and work in the engineering team. Part of my job is to manage technical readiness for our product. I want to make sure you have all the information you need to truly get more productivity from using Microsoft Teams. I have a long history in the collaboration space designing solutions with SharePoint and Office 365. Having spent part of my career in Microsoft IT deploying and managing collaboration & communication services for our own employees I have a special place in my heart for user communities that provide a hub for learning, sharing and creating the comradery that comes from taking this journey together.

 

We've worked hard on bringing over 100 new features to the product since our preview launch in November of 2016. We hope that you watch the webcast to gain key information about our future vision and hear from customers successfully using the product today. We're going to be posting here a series of blogs from myself and guest authors to ensure you have great examples of how to use the product. Feel free to post topics you'd like us to write about or reach out to me on Twitter with your comments.

 

Our commitment to the full Office 365 stack remains strong as does our desire to get feedback from you, our user community. Make sure you are posting any feature suggestions directly into our UserVoice feedback tool. We are all intently reviewing that information to understand your needs and requests. Suphatra manages user feedback for the product and we always want to make sure that your voice is heard. For now, we hope you are testing Teams in your company to start thinking about the use cases that will make sense for your business.

 

Here are a few answers to common questions I see here in the community to get us started:

 

Q. Is Microsoft Teams available for EDU customers? 
A. Our product is currently in preview for EDU customers. We will make announcements about its general availability soon. You can stay up to date on these announcements here or at our Office Blog

Q. Microsoft Teams is now on by default in Office 365 tenants. Can I turn it off in my organization until I'm ready to deploy it? 
A. Yes. We understand you want to thoughtfully deliver this capability to your users. While we encourage people to quickly try the product hands on you can follow the instructions here, if you are a tenant administrator of your Office 365 instance, to turn the feature off.

Q. When will you allow me to invite an external guest into Microsoft Teams?
A. We've seen you vote this feature request up on UserVoice and we've committed to deliver it by June of 2017 (Q2/FY17).

 

Next week we'll be hosting an "Ask me Anything" event here online. We hope you join us and bring all your other questions! I'll see you all in the community, at this event or on Twitter.

 

Thanx & Talk to you Soon,
Karuana Gatimu
Microsoft Teams

16 Comments
Gold Contributor

Tell us more about this preview for EDU customers.  How do we enable it for our tenant?

Iron Contributor

In our EDU tenant we have a 'teaser' .. the Teams icon is there but gives an error message "D'oh! To Open the web app, you need to change your browser settings to allow third-party cookies".  3rd parties cookies are enabled.. so this must be a generic error.

 

 

Iron Contributor

Second vote for more details on preview for EDU tenants!

Microsoft

Great post Karuana! :)

Copper Contributor

If we are voting I vote for more info about education too.  General availability has told all our users that we have to yet turned on a new tool, but the truth is we can't.  If if it is not yet available to edu Microsoft should own it rather than pass it on to tenant admins.

Bronze Contributor

For those wanting to try this in the EDU environment, try this:

Go to Teams.microsoft.com and log in as an administrator for your tenant and see what happens. Your best bet is to do it as the Global Admin to make sure permissions are not an issue.

 

think this was how I got our company on Teams back in the Sept/Oct timeframe when it was in preview before there was anything in the Admin panel.

 

The worst thing that can happen is it doesn't work.

Copper Contributor

@Karuana Gatimu

 

Can you help explain to a company that is trying to implement Planner and/or Teams on which to use?  It appears there are some issues with how each app talks to eachother.  I'm having a hard time figuring out which to start using, we have departments that are broken up into teams that need plans and within plans we need to create buckets, assign tasks and have conversations, but I'm not seeing how to integrate between Planner and Teams.

 

Thank you!

Microsoft

@Matt Siems Can you explain what issues they are facing with Planner and Teams? Are they familiar with our Tabs feature? Specifically, If they click on the + icon in the top header of a channel within teams, They'll see tab gallery and there they will find a Planner tile that can be easily pinned as a tab with buckets and tasks in that planner tab and also assign the tasks to teamates with labels and due dates etc.. They can also have a converstaion around the tab. Existing Plans can also be imported into Microsoft Teams as a tab. There are a lot more features in the backlog and we'll be adding more of these in coming months.

Copper Contributor

@Mansoor MalikThey have created a Team and then a subsequent channel, then they created a plan by clicking on the + icon.  Within that plan they created buckets and tasks and assigned them.  When I switch from Teams to Planner I can see the Team that was created but not the plan itself.  Also, the buckets are empty but I can see that a task exists when I click on the "task" icon. 

Gold Contributor
The Admin Portal says, "...not available to Education...at this time...". However, the license drop-down has now changed to include "Education - Faculty and Staff" and "Education - Student". So it looks like they're readying it soon. I'm reaching out through multiple channels to try to find an ETA.
 

Microsoft

@Matt Siems Thanks for expalining the specific scenario. Currently there is not a way to navigate diretly to Plans you created in the MS Teams context from Planner's web experience but something the planner team is looking to fix in future. @Eray Chou the PM on Planner can help elaborate a bit. 

Copper Contributor

@Mansoor Malik@Eray Chou

 

Thank you for further explaining this.  So given the above communication chain, do you recommend that we operate out of Teams or Planner until both are further integrated?  We are looking to fully maximize the services that are in our subscription and are very much in need of some guidance.

 

Thanks again

Microsoft

 

@Matt Siems

 

Thanks for your question and for providing valuable feedback.  We’d love for you to keep using Teams and keep the feedback coming.  We’ve recently added the ability to launch the full Planner Web experience from the upper right of the Planner tab*, so you can easily access the full capabilities of Planner if your scenarios require it.  Overall, our goal is to maximize productivity in both products and to build a seamless integration experience between. 

 

launch.png

*Note: This may not work for Planner Tabs pinned before GA.  While we’re working on that upgrading those tabs as well, and you can work around by removing and re-pinning the Tab (make sure you pick from existing Plans).

 

 

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

I am trying to find an article that clearly outlines where content/data are stored for some of the components within Teams.  In particular:

  • Planner: which data elementars are stored in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Azure AD, or some other respository? 
  • Conversations: where is this content stored?
  • Chats: where is this content stored?
  • Activity feeds: where is this content stored?

 

How does retention policy apply to the content not in Exchange Online or SharePoint Online?

 

Can eDiscovery search all Teams content?

 

thanks,

Brian

Copper Contributor

Could M/S on thier error page please indicate which 3rd party cookies need to be enabled.

 

Given the PCER and GDPR implications, you should ne naming them and indeed the specific ones to allow rather than a silly comment asking to enable 3rd party cookies... transparency my dear watson, transparency!

 

I have identified the following domains using the GUID .txt dump file .. any others to the safe list to get this to work ..

  • microsoft.com
  • login.microsoftonline.com
  • teams.microsoft.com 
  • api.teams.skype.com
  • api.spaces.skype.com
Deleted
Not applicable

We have a team that needs to create an activity report for the month.  At the moment, the channel has a shared onenote file.  Each individual goes to a relevant page on the onenote and jots down some dotpoints about how their month played out.  This is great because it's quick and easy, doesn't have to be too structured (ie if you want to had a hand-drawn sketch, you can), all in the one place and team members can simultaneously input their thoughts.

Then, one of the EAs, reads all of the dot points and works out which content should go into the monthly report to the manager.  There are often files that need to be access as well, which are currently being added as links inside the onenote file. 

 

It all works OK, except we've had a couple of instances where someone has written straight over some report text that someone else entered, only to findout there's no version control of OneNote and some users have inadvertently deleted other user's content.

 

How is everyone using Teams to handle this scenario - a group of scattered people who want to submit their 'news' so the team can publish a summary to the rest of the office?  Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

 

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