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About this lesson
Teams adminstrators have a special responsibility to set up Teams so it works for the entire company. In this lesson, we'll review Teams administration, pointing out special features along the way.
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Quick reference
Teams Administration Overview
Teams administrators can control the behavior of Teams for the entire organization.
When to use
Make adjustments to Teams administration settings and policies to manage how Teams works for the company. Give some to who in the company can make global changes.
Instructions
Log in as the Microsoft 365 administrator of https://admin.microsoft.com and locate the Teams administration center. Once loaded, review the Dashboard to learn what is displayed at top level, including training and information resources. Find some of the important settings in the following sections:
Teams-Manage Teams
Shows the teams and allows you to Add, Edit, Archive, and Delete a team. Archive a Team when you do not want further activity on the Team, but wish to preserve the content.
Teams Policies shows you that some settings are controlled by a policy system, which is Microsoft's way of managing features and settings that run throughout Microsoft 365 as well as desktop computers and mobile devices. The Global policies, wherever you see them, apply to everyone. Review the Teams policies -> Global Policies to see that you can enable or disable the ability to Discover private teams and Create private channels.
Users
Click Users to see all the Teams users and policies applied to any particular user. This capability is useful in larger businesses where you have different policies applied to different groups or users.
Meetings
Review the Meeting policy - global policy, particularly the settings under Participants and Guests.
Meeting settings lets you enable or disable the ability for anonymous users to join a meeting. For ease of use, this is enabled by default. When enabled, anyone with a link to the meeting can participate in the meeting. You can also customize your Email invitations to meetings in these settings.
Messaging Policies
Review the available settings in Messaging policies.
Teams Apps
Review the applications listed in Manage apps. Your company may want to disable access to applications that are competitors or otherwise not suitable for your business. Note that Permission policies provide a way to build enable or disable Microsoft, Third-party, and Custom apps.
Org-wide settings
External access is focused on calling, rather than guest access to teams. Enabled by default, Teams users can make internet-based calls to other users of Teams or Skype anywhere in the world.
Guest access is disabled by default. When enabled, you can invite people outside of your company to participate in Teams. As a best-practice, follow the extended instructions in the checklist at the top of this screen to allow the best experience for guest users. The checklist involves making changes in several other areas of Microsoft/Office 365 such as SharePoint and Office 365 groups, used behind the scenes for Teams.
Hints & tips
- The person in charge of Teams at your company should spend some quality time with the Teams administration porta. When people make suggestions or issues arise in the course of business, the administrator will then have a better sense of what can or cannot be easily turned on or off.
- When guest access is enabled, take the time to apply the recommended settings in the checklist on the link at the top of the Guest access screen.
- If you make global to Teams, expect feedback from users. As a best practice, communicate to your Teams when capabilities are added or removed.
- 00:04 Teams Administrators have a special responsibility to set up teams so
- 00:08 that it works for the entire company.
- 00:10 In this lesson, we'll review Teams administration,
- 00:13 pointing out some special features along the way.
- 00:16 To access the Team's administration center,
- 00:20 sign in to office365.com using your administrator credentials.
- 00:24 Once logged in, click on the Admin icon.
- 00:28 This will take you to the Global Office 365 administration portal.
- 00:33 And then if necessary, click Show All.
- 00:37 And then under Admin centers click Teams.
- 00:42 A more direct path, but one that might be
- 00:44 a little harder to remember is to login to admin.teams.microsoft.com.
- 00:49 Once you're in the Team's admin portal,
- 00:52 there are lots of settings that you can control as an administrator.
- 00:56 It's out of scope to review this in a comprehensive way but
- 00:59 we will review settings that are commonly needed.
- 01:02 By default Teams to set up to work quite well and
- 01:04 you may not even need to come to the Admin Center at all.
- 01:07 But there are some things that you should know.
- 01:09 The landing pages your own here is called the dashboard.
- 01:12 This has recent activity displayed graphically.
- 01:16 Of interest are on the lower right where it says learn more and training.
- 01:21 These resources can be quite useful to spend some time with,
- 01:24 inorder to learn more about Teams.
- 01:26 Clicking the down arrow under Teams brings us to Manage teams and Teams policy.
- 01:31 If you click on Manage Teams, you'll see a list of all the teams that are available.
- 01:36 And you can edit the settings for each individual Team.
- 01:41 Select the Team and click Edit.
- 01:43 You'll see we could change the Team name, make it public or private, and
- 01:48 we could control behavior about conversations and channels.
- 01:53 Also, from this screen,
- 01:54 you can archive a Team which puts a team into read only mode.
- 01:58 This way you can turn off inactivity with a Team but
- 02:01 still have it be discoverable and viewable.
- 02:05 And you can also delete a Team which removes the entire Team and
- 02:09 all the activity associated with it.
- 02:12 An important concept in Teams is the notion of policies.
- 02:15 The policy system in Office 365 and
- 02:18 Microsoft 365 is a complex system that allows administrators to fine tune
- 02:23 settings related to users applications and security across the entire suite.
- 02:28 Frequently, you'll see by default a global policy,
- 02:31 it's worth looking at the global policy because they can be quite involved.
- 02:36 And they apply across the entire organization for
- 02:39 all the users using this particular policy.
- 02:43 In this case, we're looking at Teams so
- 02:45 all Teams users have a global policy applied to them.
- 02:49 This particular policy, though global, is quite simple.
- 02:52 You can control whether by default everyone can discover private Teams or
- 02:56 create private channels.
- 02:58 It is possible to create new policies and assign them to specific users or groups.
- 03:03 Clicking on Users,
- 03:04 you'll see that we have the ability to look at each individual user.
- 03:08 And you can see here the view policies option.
- 03:12 By clicking on the policies,
- 03:13 we'll be able to see all the policies that are applied to an individual user.
- 03:17 And here you can see what I mean when I said policies are a big deal in
- 03:22 Microsoft and Office 365.
- 03:24 Clicking on Meetings, we have the Meeting policies.
- 03:27 Once again, clicking on the Global policy will show us quite a few settings that you
- 03:31 may be interested in.
- 03:32 So just to restate, it's worth clicking on the Global policies to see what is here.
- 03:37 For example, you can turn off screen sharing.
- 03:40 You can turn off PowerPoint sharing, lots of different capabilities and
- 03:44 possibilities here.
- 03:45 When you click on meeting settings, you'll see that you can turn on and
- 03:50 off anonymous users can join a meeting.
- 03:53 When enabled, anyone with the link can join a meeting.
- 03:56 Otherwise, users have to authenticate to a trusted system first.
- 03:59 Importantly, you can also customize the email invitation for
- 04:03 when you schedule meetings.
- 04:05 Here you can click Preview invite to see what the invitation looks like.
- 04:11 Under messaging policies,
- 04:12 the global policies again have many potentially useful settings.
- 04:16 With Team apps you can control which applications you will permit and
- 04:21 which you will deny.
- 04:23 Under Org wide settings are the settings for external access.
- 04:26 By default, you can use Teams to communicate with any Skype for business or
- 04:31 team user anywhere in the world that permits it.
- 04:35 In addition, you can use Teams to communicate with Skype users.
- 04:39 If you prefer to turn those off or control which domains those users most come from.
- 04:44 Then you can do so using external access.
- 04:47 Again, this is limited to interaction for chat, rather than Team's participation.
- 04:53 To control Team's participation for
- 04:55 users outside of your organization, you want to enable Guest access.
- 05:00 By default, this is turned off.
- 05:02 So if you want to invite people outside of your company to participate in your team,
- 05:07 turn this on.
- 05:08 And this will allow you to control settings specifically for those users.
- 05:13 In addition, you want to check on this checklist.
- 05:16 This takes you through several other steps that are necessary and useful,
- 05:20 in order to permit guest access to Teams.
- 05:22 While this looks a little challenging, it's actually not that hard.
- 05:25 And stepping through these steps will allow you to invite guests to Teams, which
- 05:30 can greatly enhance the functionality of teams for your organization.
- 05:34 Most organizations don't require that much time the Team's Administration Console.
- 05:38 But you've seen some of the more common settings that you can adjust only as
- 05:41 a Team's Administrator.
- 05:43 Take some time to browse through the settings and
- 05:45 familiarize yourself with what's possible here.
- 05:48 That'll pay off later as you get more sophisticated with the use of Teams and
- 05:52 your organization.
- 05:53 In review of Teams administration,
- 05:55 access teams administration from the Office 365 Admin app.
- 06:00 By default Teams are set up very well for general use and
- 06:03 you will generally have a lot of tweaking to do.
- 06:06 In many cases when you do make adjustments they are controlled by policy.
- 06:10 Global policies apply to everyone, and you can create additional
- 06:15 policies to apply custom settings to groups or individuals.
- 06:19 Common adjustments made in teams administration are to enable and
- 06:24 disable features for team meetings.
- 06:26 Also to allow users to create or delete channels within a Team.
- 06:30 Importantly, you'll want to customize Team meeting emails for
- 06:34 your particular company.
- 06:36 And in Team administrator is required to enable guests to be able to be invited
- 06:41 to participate as a member of a Team.
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