SOLVED

Activate teams for part of my organisation

Microsoft

Saw the event on MS teams, which looks very promising. I know we can enable it in our tenant now, but is there any way we can limit who this is released to, rather than releasing to all in our tenant while in preview mode? We want to prepare our internal teams to support it when released to GA in Q1.

14 Replies
Same question from me and it's really important. If we couldn't get it enabled for a limited number of users, we might not be able to give it a proper test.

I have activated Teams on my tennant and am trying to make it available for a certain group. Members of that groups should be the only people allowed to create teamsites (as explained in the Microsoft Mechanics video about this). Unfortunately when I try to assign a group I appear to come into a loop. 

 

I am send to the Groups admin part of the tennant and am unable to assign a specific group to this fucntionality. Am I doing something wrong here? 

Same as @Filip Krivoshiev, we need to just enable it for selective individuals to evaluate it.  Is that possible? Incidentally, will Teams have its own licence, as a way of controlling access and visibility? Thanks.

Same question here. We assume we will need to enable it for the entire tenant and then use a powershell script to disable it for every individual account. Then manually enabling just those we want to use the tool. Is this correct?
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

I have the answer, it's in the (very good) admin FAQ, which I have just come across:

 

Can I enable Microsoft Teams for only a portion of the organization?

 

At this time, user-level control is not yet available. Administrators can control access only at the organization level. We expect this capability to be available soon . After it is available, you can turn on or turn off the Microsoft Teams license for individual users.

 

That's great to know the feature can be expected soon.

Thanks for the info.  What is wierd is that I read that same FAQ yesterday and I swear it said something different.  Thanks again for checking.

What I read is slightly different and exactly what I think all of us want. From the same FAQ.


What admin controls are there for Microsoft Teams?

As an administrator for your organization, you can turn on or turn off Microsoft Teams for your organization, you can turn on or turn off Microsoft Teams for individual users, and you can allow or block what content sources can be used in Microsoft Teams. See Administrator settings for Microsoft Teams for more details.
For others still watching this thread... looks like individual licensing has been enabled on my tenant.

I see it too, but it's defaulting to ON for those users. Which means that when we flip the master switch then everyone gets it. Do you know how to disable Teams for all but a small handful of users? We have 10000 users and manually disabling the license isn't a solution...

It is an ugly process. You can access the licensing through PowerShell, extract all your users, run the command to unlicense them through a script, then enable only the ones you want. It is not ideal by any means. Worse yet, any new users that are enabled in the tenant will most likely default to on as well so those will need to be managed.

Maybe not so bad in an small org, but our tenant has 15k accounts and you can only manage 5k at a time through powershell (if it doesn't time out).

Note we have not done this yet. But it is the same process we ran through with Yammer.

Sure hope MS is listening to this (cc: @Laurie Pottmeyer)

 

This is the way it should work.

 

1) Tenant settings off = user licenses off. Turn on individual users for testing

2) Tenant setting on = user licenses on. Turn off license for users who've abused chat or for other reasons

 

As it stands, we sort of have the worst-of-both-worlds. Once you turn it on, it's basically impossible to disable it unless you're in a tiny org.  This SURELY is not in the spirit of having per-user licensing in the pre-production rollout period.

Been looking into this and true not the best solution , cant answer for huge companies.

 

For existing user you only need to remove team service not the license cant find any issues with thottling when it comes to services on a specific licens anyway below should fix for existing users

https://technet.microsoft.com/sv-se/library/dn771769.aspx

 

And then maybe use below for bulk add new users(

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Office365-License-cfd9489c

 

 

I think because teams is so integrated with office365 which behaves in the same way that when you enable for tenant its service enabled on all user in the tenant.

They cant handle it in any otherway , but i sure hope they will find a way :)

It seems that there now is a solution coming, where you could disable Teams on an organizational level, but give individuals access. This is a message from 23th of December in our message center:

 

”Previously, Microsoft Teams access could only be managed via an organization-level on/off switch. With this update, user access to Microsoft Teams can now be managed via user licenses as well as at the organizational level. This makes it easy to pilot Microsoft Teams within your organization before rolling it out broadly. As enabling per user licensing results in a sign-in blocker for anyone without their license enabled, we will begin to adhere to user license assignments the week of January 9th to provide you time to make licensing changes within your organization.”

Connie: Thank you for TechNet posts!
1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

I have the answer, it's in the (very good) admin FAQ, which I have just come across:

 

Can I enable Microsoft Teams for only a portion of the organization?

 

At this time, user-level control is not yet available. Administrators can control access only at the organization level. We expect this capability to be available soon . After it is available, you can turn on or turn off the Microsoft Teams license for individual users.

 

That's great to know the feature can be expected soon.

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