Guidelines for using Microsoft Teams
Best practises for using MS Teams at the University
Why use Teams?
Microsoft Teams provides a simple way for groups of people to collaborate on content in a secure manner. The following provides some basic guidelines to help you set up your team and manage the content you’ll create within it.
A number of elements within Microsoft Teams are managed by the University and these can’t be changed, this ensures we keep the environment safe and compliant with University policies.
Teams structure and permissions
As Teams is designed for collaboration the guiding principle is to make everything within the Team open by default. The Team itself will be only accessible to Owners and Members that have been explicitly added and all members and owners should generally have access to all content within the Team.
When you have some content that needs to be controlled so that only a subset of Team members can access it create a Private Channel within the Team and store the content there. Remember that for people to access a Private Channel they must be a member of the Team first and as such will always have access to the “General” Channel.
When you have some content that needs to be accessed by people who aren’t part of the Team and you don’t want them to have access to the General Channel, create a Shared Channel instead. Shared Channels have their own list of members that are independent from the parent Team.
Important
- To create a new Team you must go to MyHub - not using the Join or create a team button. Only add people who need to be in the team.
- Note that students can do everything in Teams except for being able to create a new meeting.
- You can only create a Team that has students or staff at the University of Auckland using their University of Auckland details. You cannot add external people or share files with people outside the University.
- Do not use Teams to contact student experience support staff directly - contact Student Services Online or visit one of the convenient Student Hubs.
- Don’t use Teams to chat to someone you don’t actually know.
- Be respectful and considerate, both with the contents of your message and when you send it.
- All activity on Teams can be reported on if required.
Tips
- Teams becomes the most useful when everyone in the team uses it for collaboration. Discourage people from emailing versions of files to the group and encourage them instead to create a document in teams and then share it so everyone can work together and have easy access to the latest version.
- Use @ to mention either individuals, channel names or the whole team, but use the appropriate one so you’re not spamming people who aren’t interested in your message.
- If you are finding notifications are too frequent you can change them using these manage notifications in teams instructions.
- If you want to block notifications from an individual, go to the chat, click on the … and click Mute.
- Don’t email files to others – use shared documents to collaborate.