Feb 19 2020 01:34 AM
Hi Everyone
This is going to be a bit of an...odd request for advice but hear me out there are good (or at least dumb political) reasons I'm asking questions.
TLDR version: what's the absolute minimum infrastructure needed to get Teams running and be able to schedule meetings?
Longer version: My employer is looking for a video conferencing and distance learning solution for meetings and international teaching. At the moment we're using a very old version of Adobe Connect and Google Hangouts (as we are a "Google House"). One of the options I am looking at is Microsoft Teams as its pretty feature-rich, "works in China" and you can do stuff like hanging IP Telephony off it if you want to.
As well as using GSuite we do have an Office 365 EDU site licence so that students can download Office 365 on their own PCs while studying with us. Our systems team fudged the back end functions required for this as they were only interested in getting Office 365 access for students running. After signing up myself and playing around, I found that we do have access to Teams as part of the package.
Right now it works...after a fashion. I don't have admin rights myself, but it looks like we don't have exchange services up and running meaning that there is not working calendar that Teams can communicate with. This means that you can use core functions like creating teams, chat, audio/video conferences and recording of said conferences. This is fine for evaluating it as a tool but its crippling if you want to actually use it as a meetings tool as you cant pre-plan meetings.
So my question is: can we fudge enough exchange functions to get the scheduling functions in Teams working without having to unpack and implement a full Exchange instance?
I appreciate that this question sounds absurd, but we are already paying for Teams, and it does most of what we want. I fully understand if the answer is no, but any advice would be really appreciated.
Feb 19 2020 04:13 AM
Feb 19 2020 04:22 AM
Thanks @Christopher Hoard
This was more wishful thinking on my behalf considering that someone had bashed Office 365 until it worked without actually implementing exchange (if you try and open outlook online it just crashes out). At the moment we're not tenanted (I think that's the right term) so users have to sign up one at a time. I'm hoping this means we can put together a proof of concept exchange instance without ruffling too many feathers so we can do an evaluation.
Considering how entrenched managers who have control over comms are with regards to staying with G Suite I may have to shelve this idea but not without a fight.
Feb 19 2020 04:39 AM
SolutionFeb 19 2020 04:39 AM
Solution